In an interview with @andersoncooper, Donald Trump defends calling Hillary Clinton a bigot https://t.co/6cJkAcT6i9 https://t.co/65xoPNOtn9
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 25, 2016
Donald Trump stood by calling Hillary Clinton a “bigot” after the Democratic candidate accused him of stoking racial resentment in a speech Thursday.
“She is a bigot,” Trump told Anderson Cooper during an interview clip aired on CNN’s “Situation Room.”
{mosads}”You look at what’s happening to the inner cities. You look at what’s happening to African-Americans and Hispanics in this country, where she talks all the time,” Trump said.
“She is selling them down the tubes, because she’s not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game, but she doesn’t do anything.”
“Her policies are bigoted because she knows they’re not going to work,” Trump added.
When pressed about whether he was calling Clinton herself or her policies bigoted, the billionaire responded: “She is, of course she is.”
Trump called Clinton a bigot during a rally in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday night, claiming she “sees people of color only as votes,” doubling down on his previous promise to reject her “bigotry.”
Trump on Thursday reiterated the argument he’s made in several recent speeches that “the inner cities are worse than they’ve ever been” for minority communities. He mentioned poverty and unemployment among African-Americans.
“They’ve been talking about this since I was 5 years old and understood what was going on,” Trump told CNN. “They’ve been talking about this for years.”
The interview with Cooper came shortly after Clinton slammed Trump on race and his connections to “alt-right” groups during a speech in Reno, Nev. She hammered Trump for naming former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive, accusing Trump of giving a national platform to a “paranoid fringe.”
“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right. A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party,” Clinton said in her speech.