Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says there is no “alt-right” — a term ethno-nationalists have used to describe a new subset of the conservative movement and one Hillary Clinton tried to tie Mr. Trump to on Thursday.
“Nobody even knows what it is. And she didn’t know what it was. This is a term that was just given that frankly, there’s no alt-right or alt-left. All I’m embracing is common sense,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with CNN Thursday.
Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, the newly installed CEO of the Trump campaign, told Mother Jones last month that Breitbart is “the platform for the alt-right.”
“I don’t know what Steve said. All I can tell you, I can only speak for myself,” Mr. Trump said.
“You see the crowds we have. You see the enthusiasm. … These are great people,” he said. “These are people that have not been heard for many years and now they’ve been heard, first time in many, many decades. In fact, some people say the first time, period.”
Mr. Trump also told WMUR in New Hampshire Thursday that he doesn’t want white supremacists to vote for him.
“No, I don’t at all — not at all. And I will tell you, this is not about hate. This is about love,” Mr. Trump said. “We love our country. We want our country to come back. We want our country to be strong again.”
In the CNN interview, Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton is the one who is “totally bigoted.”
“Her policies are bigoted. Her policies are bigoted because she knows they’re not going to work,” he said.
“Or maybe she’s lazy. I don’t know what it is,” he said. “All I can tell you is I’ve been hearing the same stuff from her and others for years and the inner cities today are worse than they ever have been.”
In a speech in Nevada Thursday, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Trump is “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,” she said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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