Hillary Clinton is doubling down on her most infamous attack on Trump supporters

Hillary Clinton is not backing down from her most famous attack on Donald Trump’s supporters.

She stoked their anger in 2016 when she said half of them belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” comments that were then used against her to show she was not only out of touch with voters, but hostile versus white working-class voters.

Eight years after losing that election, she admits the nickname was “bad politics” but questions whether she should have gone further.

“I was talking about the people who are attracted to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia — you name it,” she writes in her new book, “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty.” . reprinted by the Washington Post. “The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug.

“It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also came to an important truth.

“Just look at everything that’s happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to January 6.

“The masks have fallen off, and if anything, ‘deplorable’ is too kind a word for the hatred and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.”

At the time, most of her other comments were lost in the storm caused by the word “deplorables.”

It became a badge of honor for Trump fans, turned into T-shirts, hats and memes.

Clinton lost the Electoral College just over a month later, but prevailed in the popular vote.

She said she felt vindicated in her analysis of the rise of hate under Trump, recounting how a newspaper editor contacted her in 2022 to see if she would revisit the term after a mass shooting.

A gunman in Buffalo fatally shot black customers at a supermarket, apparently influenced by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory spread by Trump allies like then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The newspaper editor said he and his colleagues discussed this report for half an hour during their editorial meeting, and “the idea that the most racist show on cable news is also the most popular stuck with many of us.” she writes.

The insult became a badge of honor for Trump supporters, turned into T-shirts and hats

“Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty” was published September 17 by Simon & Schuster

“Several editors, he said, brought up my ‘regrettable’ comment and ‘how prescient’ I had been.”

She turned down the offer, she continues, because she didn’t want to write about it through the lens of a six-year-old controversy.

“I wish people in 2016 had heard the rest of my comments and not just the word ‘regrettable,’” she wrote.

“I was also talking about the other half of Trump supporters, ‘people who feel like the government has failed them, the economy has failed them, nobody cares about them, nobody cares about what’s happening to their lives and their futures, and they ‘I’m just desperate for change.’”

But she says she regrets describing most of the deplorable problems as “irreparable.”