“I was surprised,” one close Clinton ally in the audience told POLITICO, describing his reaction when he heard the remark. “But I think that she was being honest — and that’s refreshing, even if not politic — as to where Trump is getting much, but not all, of his support.”
Perhaps the greatest effect of “deplorables” will be on the psychology of Clinton’s campaign. Coming days after NBC’s Matt Lauer seemed to give Trump a fact-check-free pass during a live presidential forum — after grilling Clinton aggressively on her email use — it uncorked a huge amount of pent-up frustration at the Democratic nominee’s Brooklyn headquarters. There, many Clinton operatives saw the Republican outrage and media attention devoted to Clinton’s words as the latest example of an absurd double standard at work…
“[T]his is a fight we’re eager to have,” Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said in a statement that reinforced her own. “We will never stop calling out Trump’s bigotry and racist rhetoric, because we know our country is better than this.”
But Clinton’s inartful honesty briefly handed the moral high ground of the campaign to an opponent whose character and judgment the former secretary of state has been methodically trying to impeach. And it allowed Republicans, for a day at least, to rally behind a nominee that many of them find deeply distasteful.
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