THE HILL: Trump blasts Clinton for comments about Bernie Sanders supporters.
Donald Trump sought to drive a wedge into the Democratic Party by capitalizing on newly released audio from a February Hillary Clinton fundraiser to paint her as dismissive to Bernie Sanders supporters.
The GOP nominee has long tried to woo disaffected Democrats over to his party and spent much of his speech linking his anti-free trade policies to Sanders’ primary campaign message.
So the latest attempt at Saturday night’s rally in small-town Pennsylvania casts Clinton as dismissive to those very Democrats with whom her campaign has worked to make a tenuous peace.
“Hillary Clinton thinks Bernie supporters are hopeless and ignorant basement dwellers. Then, of course, she thinks people who vote for and follow us are deplorable and irredeemable. I don’t think so,” he said at the Manheim, Pa., rally. . . .
The controversy over Clinton’s comments stems from February audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, where Clinton lamented Sanders supporters as unrealistically idealistic.
“There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what it means but it is something that they deeply feel,” she said of Sanders , according to the audio.
“Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement,” she added, going on to say that many are dissatisfied with their job prospects and that politicians need to understand where they are coming from.
Clinton opponents have taken to Twitter to push their outrage over the comments–the hashtag “BasementDwellers” was one of the most popular hashtags in America by the time of the rally.
But the Democratic nominee’s allies and Sanders’ own aides have blasted that reading of her comments as a stretch, with her campaign releasing a statement arguing she is “fighting for exactly what the millennial generation cares about–a fairer, more equal, just world.”
Related: Trump moves to poach Sanders supporters with Clinton remarks.
Plus: Clinton camp on leaked audio: She’s fighting for millennials.