Washington: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told an audience of donors that half of Republican rival Donald Trump's supporters fall into "the basket of deplorables", meaning people who are racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic.
In an effort to explain the support behind Trump, Clinton on Friday night went on to describe the rest of Trump supporters as people who are looking for change in any form because of economic anxiety and urged her supporters to empathise with them, CNN reported.
"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," Clinton said, adding "Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it."
"And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric," CNN reported citing the former secretary of state as saying.
Clinton went on to say that some of these people were "irredeemable" and "not America".
"One day after promising to be aspirational and uplifting, Hillary insults millions of Americans. desperate," Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted in response.
Clinton made the comments before introducing Barbra Streisand at an LGBT fundraiser in New York.
According to average ticket prices and attendance figures provided by the campaign, Clinton raised around $6 million at the fundraiser, only the sixth she has opened to press, CNN noted.
While she has headlined over 330 fundraisers as a candidate, her campaign has kept most of these events closed from the media.
