(Salon) — Hillary Clinton has a problem. She tells impolitic truths at inopportune times. During the 2016 presidential campaign she described a large subset of Donald Trump’s supporters as being “a basket of deplorables.” She was correct. Donald Trump is an authoritarian petite-fascist who is also racist, ignorant, greedy and corrupt. He may be a traitor in cahoots with Russia and is certainly a misogynist and serial liar who brags about sexually assaulting women. Anyone who would vote for such a person is in fact deplorable. Moreover, anyone who continues to support Donald Trump after witnessing his behavior as president is deplorable in the extreme.
Over the weekend while at a conference in India, Clinton let slip another truth about Trump’s voters and the 2016 presidential election. Democrats, she said, “do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
She continued by saying that “all that red in the middle” of the nation, where Trump and the Republicans tend to dominate, was deceptive because “what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” Trump’s campaign, she said, “was looking backwards” by playing to white voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights” or women leaving the home and getting jobs.
