Hillary’s Desperate Attempt to Disqualify Trump

Warning Republican Donald Trump is “profoundly dangerous” and spews a “steady stream of bigotry,” Democrat Hillary Clinton sought Thursday to make it unacceptable for normal Americans to vote for him — and to mask her burgeoning scandals with hyperbolic rhetoric.

Trump is nothing short of a racist demagogue, and he has been that way for decades, Clinton told her audience in Reno, Nevada. She told voters not to waste their time waiting for a different Trump to emerge.

“When Democratic policies fail, they are left with only this one tired argument … It’s a tired, disgusting argument. And it’s so totally predictable.”

It’s worth wondering that if Trump is so bad and so racist — and has been for so long — why did Clinton accept the invitation to attend his 2005 wedding?

The Trump campaign immediately characterized Clinton’s remarks as an act of desperation by a candidate coming off a week in which newly released emails from her tenure as secretary of state bolstered claims that she engaged in quid pro quo at the State Department: granting favors and special access to mega-donors to the family-run Clinton Foundation.

“Hillary Clinton’s attempt to delete the single worst week of her political career isn’t going to work,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a prepared statement. “Her admission that there’s a lot of smoke but no fire is a complete lie, and the American public’s response will be to do exactly as her campaign suggests: Don’t vote for her.”

In her own statement, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said that as Clinton “took a break from her Hillary-in-Hiding Tour, she missed another opportunity to talk about education, infrastructure, terrorism, health care, the economy, and energy.”

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During an appearance in New Hampshire prior to Clinton’s address, Trump called allegations of racism against him “the oldest play in the Democratic playbook” and predicted the strategy would not work.

“When Democratic policies fail, they are left with only this one tired argument … It’s a tired, disgusting argument. And it’s so totally predictable. They’re failing so badly,” he said in Manchester. “It’s the last refuge of the discredited Democrat politician. They keep going back to the same well — but you know what? The people are becoming very smart. They’ve heard it too many times before. The well is dry.”

In August 2012, media pundits on MSNBC and other liberal supporters of President Obama characterized a joke from Mitt Romney about not needing a birth certificate to prove he was from Michigan as racist.

“[Romney’s] scraping the very bottom of this sort of racist other-ist narrative,’ MSNBC host Alex Wagner said at the time.

The Obama campaign was quick to capitalize on the chance to taint Romney with the ugly markings of prejudice.

“Take a moment or two to think about that, what he’s actually saying, and what it says about Mitt Romney. Then make a donation of $3 or more to re-elect Barack Obama today,” read an email blast from Obama campaign manager Jim Messina.

Trump said American political debate often falls into this familiar pattern: A Democratic candidate on the run dusts off the race card, forces the Republican to back down, and then cruises to victory. That will not work this year, Trump said, because he is going to “break this corrupt cycle.” He said people who want secure borders are not racists. People who are worried about radical Muslims are not Islamophobes. And people who want less crime and support police are not prejudiced.

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Trump said charges of racism against him unfairly slander millions of ordinary Americans who support him.

“She lies and she smears, and she paints decent Americans — you — as racists,” he said. “She bullies voters who only want a better future, and tries to intimidate them out of voting for a change.”

Clinton did not speak about the issues during her Reno address. Instead, she concentrated on concerns about Trump she claims she has heard on the campaign trail.

“I understand that concern, because it’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for president of the United States from one of our two major parties,” she said. “From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.”

Clinton — who has her own fringe supporters, from Black Lives Matter to the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter — tried to disqualify Trump through guilt by association. She recycled a number of allegations against Trump from earlier in the campaign — that he has retweeted white supremacists, that he refused to disavow former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke, that used an anti-Semitic symbol in an anti-Clinton tweet, and that he lied about seeing TV news report showing thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attack.

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Clinton also reeled off a number of incendiary headlines that have appeared on Breitbart News, where his new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, used to be chairman. And she repeated controversial quotes by Nigel Farage, the British politician who led the drive for the U.K.’s Brexit referendum — and who appeared with Trump this week on the campaign trail.

Clinton said Trump has no solutions to “take on the reality of systemic racism” in America.

“What he’s doing here is more sinister: Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters,” he said. “It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of president he’d be.”

Clinton offered no solutions of her own, however. Trump depicted the election as a referendum on the Democratic Party and liberal philosophies that have ruled America’s major cities with large black populations for decades. He recited statistics showing African-Americans lagging on poverty measures, youth employment, crime victimization, and school performance.

“These are the consequences of Hillary Clinton’s policies and the policies of people who think like her,” she said. “She has brought nothing but pain and heartache and broken promises to your inner cities.”