Ms. MacIntosh had called Mr. Trump one day in May 1997 to ask him about a tip she had received that his second wife, Marla Maples, had purchased two gold Lexus cars and that he had made her return them.
“He said, ‘I have something better for you,’” Ms. MacIntosh recalled in an interview on Wednesday. If she dropped that story, he said, he would give her bigger news — that he planned to divorce Ms. Maples. When Ms. MacIntosh pressed him on why, he “essentially blamed her family,” she said, referring to Ms. Maples’s Georgia-based relatives.
“Are you old enough to remember the show ‘The Beverly Hillbillies?’” he asked Ms. MacIntosh.
She replied yes, and Mr. Trump laughed and said, “That’s exactly her family, except they came to New York City instead of Beverly Hills.” Ms. MacIntosh added, “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said she was constantly surrounded ‘by an entourage of dumb Southerners.’” He even adopted a fake southern accent to mimic Ms. Maples’s mother, Ms. MacIntosh said.Northerners ridiculing Southerners is, of course, old news. I've written about it most recently here. But coming from President Trump, these words and attitudes become political news because he has relied so heavily on southern white voters to put him in power.
The incident reminds me of a time early in my teaching career when a student who had grown up in greater New York City approached me about five weeks into the semester and said something like this, "You know, Professor Pruitt, we didn't think you were very smart at the beginning of the semester, because of your accent and such. But you really have quite a vocabulary, and we've changed our assessment of you." Gee, thanks! At least that student had remained open to changing her assessment over the course of those early weeks.
I find it perplexing how the WWC can overlook Trump's degrading "dumb southerners" comment, but started an uproar over Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment which was not even referring to the WWC as a whole. Her entire comment actually reads as follows:
ReplyDelete"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The 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 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
"But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
The second half of Hill's quote (the other basket) is referring exactly to the WWC and their plight. Yet the WWC only hung on to the "deplorables" moniker as if she was throwing all of rural America in that basket.