Fox News host Harris Faulkner made a keen observation on Friday as she and her other “Outnumbered” co-hosts discussed former President Donald Trump’s ‘MAGA’ movement.
Namely, she identified Hillary Clinton as the person solely responsible for igniting enough hatred for what she brought to the table during her failed 2016 Democratic presidential campaign to give rise to Trump.
“I normally don’t blame one person for an entire moment, nor do I give them total credit either. She was a specific case of bringing hate to a new level in this country,” she said, citing Clinton’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe ordinary Americans who were supportive of Trump and his ideals. Clinton went on to describe what she meant by the remark made Sept. 10, 2016: Americans who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
“Her husband was the one in dynamically similar straits that we are today economically who said ‘I feel your pain’ to every single American. He was able to do something that really we haven’t seen anybody do since, and that’s bring the entire country together. Maybe just for that moment. Lord knows he had his issues, right,” Faulkner continued.
“But with her, it particularly was damaging for her to express her hate for half the country after having been in the White House for eight years when it wasn’t specifically like that, when people were really down and you didn’t kick them when they were down. You tried to help them with a better economy, with saying that you understood them,” she added.
The problem, the Fox News host said, is that today nearly all left-wing elitists think just like Clinton did back then and, presumably, still does.
“So now you fast-forward, and we get the Clinton crowd. The Hillary Clinton version of that crowd. And we’re only growing more of them, because it’s easier sometimes to profligate hate than it is to shed your grace in love, apparently,” said Faulkner.
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Her comments came amid an admission by right-leaning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote a mea culpa op-ed on Thursday in which he admitted judging Trump’s supporters entirely too harshly.
“What were they seeing that I wasn’t? That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo,” Stephens wrote.
That “failing status quo” is exemplified by unsafe neighborhoods, financial insecurity, burgeoning “wokeness,” and so much more that the left-wing elite and RINO class have visited upon most of the country for decades.
“This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions,” Stephens noted further.
