Millennials irked by Clinton diss
Hillary Clinton dismissed millennials as “children of the Great Recession” who are “living in their parents’ basement,” according to a taped speech that recently came to light.
She also derided them for naively falling for rival Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “false promises” — including his freecollege pledge that she has since adopted as her own.
Sanders fans and Donald Trump’s supporters seized on the comments Saturday as the hashtag #BasementDwellers trended on Twitter.
Many of them drew a parallel to the “basket of deplorables” slur that Clinton used to describe Trump voters last month.
“Scoot over #Deplorables we Bernie #BasementDwellers are going to need some room in that basket!” tweeted Kcora Jaretsky.
“We might be #BasementDwellers in your eyes, but we told you #BernieOrBust was real,” wrote Dustin Templeton. “Good luck without us in November.”
Clinton’s comments came from audio of her private fund-raiser at the home of former Ambassador Beatrice Welters in McLean, Va., on Feb. 16. The recording, leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, came to light when hackers breached an e-mail account be- longing to a campaign staffer.
“There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free health care, that . . . we just need to, you know, go as far as Scandinavia, whatever that means — and half the people don’t even know what that means,” she told a laughing crowd of big-money donors.
“If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to being a barista . . . then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing,” she said.
“I mean, I’m still trying to understand the revolution part,” she said to laughter.
Trump hammered Clinton for the tone-deaf remarks at a Saturday rally in Manheim, Pa.
The audio, he said, “shows her demeaning and mocking Bernie Sanders and all of his supporters . . . in a really sarcastic tone, because she’s a sarcastic woman.”
“If you’re not a diehard Hillary Clinton supporter from day one, Hillary Clinton thinks you are a defective person,” he said.
A Gallup poll released last week showed a sharp drop in enthusiasm among millennial voters compared with 2008, when Barack Obama captured their imaginations and pushed them to the voting booth. In September 2008, 74 percent of voters age 18 to 35 said they planned to vote in November, the highest number ever recorded.
This year, just 47 percent of that age group say they intend to vote in the presidential election.
Sanders is scheduled to campaign for Clinton this week in Iowa and Minnesota to help boost her support among younger voters.