Trump: Calling him a 'racist' a tired ploy

Clinton warns rival helped GOP go ‘radical’; he says she distracts with lies

“Shame on you,” Donald Trump said Thursday at a rally in Manchester, N.H., in confronting claims by Hillary Clinton that he has “a long history of racial discrimination” and is helping “a radical fringe” take over the Republican Party.
“Shame on you,” Donald Trump said Thursday at a rally in Manchester, N.H., in confronting claims by Hillary Clinton that he has “a long history of racial discrimination” and is helping “a radical fringe” take over the Republican Party.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Donald Trump confronted allegations of "prejudice" on Thursday, defending his hard-line approach to immigration while trying to make the case to minority-group voters that Democrats have abandoned them.

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AP

Clinton, in a speech in Reno, Nev., spoke out against the so-called alt-right movement.


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His general-election opponent, Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, hammered the point that Trump unleashed the "radical fringe" within the Republican Party, including anti-Semites and white supremacists, dubbing the New York businessman's campaign as one that will "make America hate again."

"Don't be fooled" by Trump's efforts to rebrand, she told voters in a speech at a community college in Reno, Nev., saying the country faced a "moment of reckoning."

"From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia," Clinton said. "He's taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. ... A man with a long history of racial discrimination who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far dark reaches of the Internet should never run our government or command our military."

The accusations come as the two candidates vie for minority-group and undecided voters with less than three months until Election Day. Weeks before the first early voting, Trump faces the task of revamping his image to win over those skeptical of his candidacy.

In a tweet shortly after Clinton wrapped up her speech in the swing state of Nevada, Trump said she "is pandering to the worst instincts in our society. She should be ashamed of herself!"

Trump tried to get ahead of the Democratic nominee, addressing a crowd in Manchester, N.H., just minutes before Clinton spoke in Reno.

"It's the oldest play in the Democratic playbook," Trump said. "When Democratic policies fail, they are left with only this one tired argument: You're racist, you're racist, you're racist. They keep saying it: You're racist. It's a tired, disgusting argument, and it's so totally predictable."

He continued: "To Hillary Clinton, and to her donors and advisers, pushing her to spread her smears and her lies about decent people, I have three words. I want you to hear these words, and remember these words: Shame on you."

Trump tried to turn the tables on Clinton, suggesting she was trying to distract from questions swirling around donations to the Clinton Foundation and her use of her private email servers.

"She lies, she smears, she paints decent Americans as racists," said Trump, who then defended some of the core ideas of his candidacy.

'More sinister'

Clinton, who in her remarks d̶i̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶"̶r̶a̶c̶i̶s̶t̶,̶"̶used the word "racist" eight times but did not directly refer to Trump as one*, did not address any of the accusations about her family foundation. Instead, she offered a denouncement of Trump's campaign, accusing him of fostering hate and pushing discriminatory policies, like his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

"Trump's lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough," Clinton said. "But what he's doing here is more sinister."

Her speech focused on the so-called alt-right movement, which is often associated with efforts on the far right to preserve "white identity," oppose multiculturalism and defend "Western values."

Clinton's campaign also released an online video that compiles footage of prominent white supremacist leaders praising Trump, who has been criticized for failing to immediately denounce the support he's gotten from white nationalists and supremacists, including former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

In an interview Thursday with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Trump pushed back against suggestions that his campaign has aligned with alt-right voters.

"Nobody even knows what it is. And [Clinton] didn't know what it was," he said. "There's no alt-right or alt-left. All I'm embracing is common sense."

Trump's new campaign chief executive officer, Stephen Bannon, had previously said the news site he oversaw, Breitbart News, was "the platform for the alt-right."

"I don't know what Steve said," Trump told CNN, adding, "We're bringing love."

Trump, who met Thursday in New York with members of a new Republican Party initiative meant to train young -- and largely minority-group-- volunteers, has been working to win over blacks and Hispanics in light of his past inflammatory comments and has been claiming that the Democrats have taken minority-group voters' support for granted. At rallies over the past week, the Republican presidential nominee cast Democratic policies as harmful to minority-group communities, including in Jackson, Miss., on Wednesday evening.

"Hillary Clinton is a bigot ... who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future," Trump said. "She's going to do nothing for African-Americans. She's going to do nothing for the Hispanics. She's only going to take care of herself, her husband, her consultants, her donors. These are the people she cares about. She doesn't care what her policies have done to your communities. She doesn't care."

He repeated that attack Thursday night on CNN.

"She is a bigot," Trump he told Cooper. "If 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."

Clinton rakes it in

Clinton has spent most of the week raising millions of dollars from big names in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Stars including Magic Johnson, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel hosted Clinton in Los Angeles, and big tech players including Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman, a longtime Republican, attended her Bay Area events.

Clinton has "compassion, commitment and courage," Whitman told a crowd of 700 gathered Wednesday in a Redwood City hotel ballroom, according to two people in the room. "I'm all in."

Whitman's appearance came at the tail end of Clinton's three-day, nine-fundraiser trip through Los Angeles, Orange County and the Bay Area that brought in at least $17.9 million. Ticket prices ranged from $500 to at least $200,000, with proceeds for the pricier events going to the Clinton campaign and to the Hillary Victory Fund, which also supports the Democratic National Committee and dozens of state Democratic parties.

Clinton's Western swing came as she faced renewed media scrutiny over the influence that Clinton Foundation donors wielded during her four years at the State Department and new developments about her email system used while she was secretary of state.

But key California backers of the Democratic nominee say they aren't concerned.

"This is just the silly season," said former California Gov. Gray Davis, who attended a 500-person fundraiser at Johnson's Beverly Hills home, where tickets cost $2,700 each. "They're trying every attack to see which one sticks."

"If the Clinton Foundation is going to be the biggest liability against Hillary in this campaign, we're going to be more than OK," said Michael Kives, an agent at Creative Artists Agency who worked for former President Bill Clinton and is a major donation bundler. "No president in history has done more in a post-presidency to better the world than Bill Clinton."

While fundraising this week, Clinton has largely stayed out of the public eye, appearing before cameras only briefly on airplane tarmacs and at hotel service entrances, though she did phone into CNN while traveling between two of her fundraisers on Wednesday.

Clinton responded to Trump's aggressive attack earlier in the day in which he called her a "bigot" who only sees blacks and Hispanics as votes.

"He is taking a hate movement mainstream," Clinton said, mentioning him challenging President Barack Obama's natural-born citizenship in 2011 and saying he has "courted white supremacists."

Clinton tried to move away from rationalizing her private email setup as secretary of state, acknowledging that when she discusses, it people think she's trying to excuse it.

"There are no excuses" she said.

Clinton also declined to commit to doing a news conference in the near future, something she hasn't done in more than 260 days.

"Stay tuned," she said "There'll be a lot of different opportunities for me to talk to the press."

Apple's Cook jumped in a staff van with campaign chairman John Podesta to travel to the final fundraiser of Clinton's trip, at the home of Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. It was an intimate three-hour dinner for just 20 people, each of whom gave at least $200,000, making it a $4 million meal for Clinton.

Other than Cook, it's been rare for the journalists traveling with Clinton to see the big-name backers turning out for Clinton, though actress Jennifer Aniston was spotted walking uphill to Timberlake and Biel's Hollywood Hills home. Actors Jamie Foxx and Tobey Maguire were also there, attendees said, as was producer Shonda Rhimes.

Trump, meanwhile, on Wednesday jabbed at Clinton for spending three days privately courting the rich and famous.

"People don't know where she is. Her supporters have very little enthusiasm," he said during a rally in Tampa, Fla. "The only people enthusiastic about her campaign are Hollywood celebrities, in many cases celebrities that aren't very hot anymore. And Wall Street donors, special interests, lobbyists, etcetera that want to control government, not to the benefit of our country but to the benefit of their wallet."

9/11 noncampaigning

Separately, Clinton's campaign announced that the Democratic candidate and her running mate, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, will not campaign or run ads on Sept. 11.

A campaign official confirmed that Clinton will refrain from stumping on the 15th anniversary of the terror attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

A national nonprofit named 9/11 Day sent letters this week to presidential candidates asking them to stop their public political activities that day. It wants to instead focus on service and remembrance.

In addition, 9/11 Day is urging people running for Congress to refrain from campaigning.

In 2012, the organization made a similar request; both Mitt Romney and Obama complied.

"We would like to rekindle that spirit of unity and togetherness that marked the mood after the attacks," said David Paine, the nonprofit's president and co-founder. "Instead, we now have a more intense degree of divisive rhetoric."

A spokesman for Trump didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire, Lisa Lerer, Jill Colvin and staff members of The Associated Press; by John Wagner, Jenna Johnson, David Weigel and staff members of The Washington Post; and by Jennifer Epstein and Sahil Kapur of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 08/26/2016

*CORRECTION: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used the word “racist” eight times in a speech Thursday in Reno, Nev., in which she tied GOP nominee Donald Trump to right-wing groups and policies that Clinton said would promote discrimination. Clinton did not directly call Trump a racist. This story incorrectly said Clinton did not use the word during her speech.

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