Trump, Hillary exchange angry charges of racism
WASHINGTON ( AFP) — The tone of the US presidential campaign turned darker on Thursday, with Hillary Clinton skewering Donald Trump as a man who flirts with racism and paranoid ideas, while he in turn labeled her a racist whose family foundation was a “criminal enterprise.”
Speaking at a campaign event in Nevada, Clinton employed unusually tough language as she detailed a history of what she said were the Republican real estate mogul’s discriminatory actions.
He had been sued as a young developer for failing to rent to black and Latino tenants, and by black employees of his casinos, the Democratic presidential candidate said.
The Republican nominee’s recent choice of Steven Bannion, a firebrand conservative, as his new campaign chief showed Trump was embracing the extremist white nationalist stances of the so-called “alt-right” movement, she said.
“A man with a long history of racial discrimination who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far dark reaches of the Internet should never run our government or command our military,” Clinton said.
Her speech came on a day when one poll showed her support reaching an important threshold — backing from just over half of all respondents. The survey by Quinnipiac University gave her a 51 to 41 percent lead over Trump in a head-to-head race.
Trump has recently attempted to enlarge his tiny base of support among blacks — it has been as low as one percent — arguing that African- Americans have “nothing to lose” by voting for him.