Christopher Caldwell

Trump’s forgotten people

The only question is whether his potential voters care more about that or about not appearing to be bigots

The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in its wake. One concerns Mrs Clinton’s apparently serious medical problem. Another concerns her opponent Donald Trump, who appears eager to run her campaign for her while she convalesces.

When felled, Mrs Clinton was two weeks into a public-relations blitz designed to tar Trump as a bigot. In August, she accused him of making the Republican party a vehicle for racism and the ‘hardline right-wing nationalism’ of Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage. At an open-to-the-press dinner for gay donors two days before her incident, she used vivid and memorable language. ‘To just be grossly generalistic,’ she said, ‘you could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. Unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up.’

This message had been designed to inflict maximum damage on Trump. And yet the moment Mrs Clinton was silenced, Trump’s campaign released a television advert playing her speech in the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Has Hillary made a mistake by ‘viciously demonising hard-working people’, as Trump alleges? Or does Trump actually think, as Hillary claims, that there are enough racists in the country to win an election with?


Christopher Caldwell, Freddy Gray and Lara Prendergast discuss Trump’s white voters:


He couldn’t possibly. There may still be a few picturesque white racists in the backwoods, the sorts of people who once wore the robes of the Ku Klux Klan and today sport do-rags and SS-rune tattoos. One Klansman, the perennial senatorial candidate David Duke, has sung Trump’s praises. These people number only in the thousands. They have as much chance of electing a president in a country of 300 million as America’s Zoroastrians.

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