A.G. Gancarski
On Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Steve Crisafulli blasted Hillary Clinton over her untimely reference to half of Donald Trump‘s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
The long-form Crisafulli response — billed as an op-ed by the Trump campaign — offers one more piece of evidence that Trump and his surrogates will use Clinton’s pejorative as a way to rally the base.
“Hillary Clinton’s hateful and divisive comments about millions of patriotic men and women are sickening and a new low, even for her,” Crisafulli wrote.
Crisafulli pivoted into a condemnation of Clinton as a “pay-to-play” elitist, disconnected from the people she desires to lead.
“As Florida’s speaker of the House, I watched Hillary Clinton defame and insult millions of hardworking Americans for simply disagreeing with her and rejecting her pay-to-play scheme at the [state] department where she traded official access for donations to the Clinton Foundation from foreign donors. By calling so many of our nation’s citizens ‘deplorable’ haters and racists and the other half too stupid to make their own decisions about who should be our next president, Hillary once again revealed how the elitist Clintons really view Americans,” Crisafulli wrote.
From there, Crisafulli posed a series of rhetorical questions: “Is the factory worker looking for a job that Hillary helped send overseas deplorable? Are the families whose sons and daughters fight for our country deplorable? Are the millions of Americans who simply want her to tell the truth deplorable? If asking these questions is reason for Hillary to put someone in a basket — she can throw me in too.
“Frustrated after years of being ignored, millions of hardworking Floridians have stood up demanding to be heard. Today Donald Trump has given them a voice against the offshoring of jobs and Clinton’s brand of Washington pay-to-play cronyism and backroom deals,” Crisafulli wrote, before adding one more jab at the end of the piece.
“Hillary Clinton’s basket is lined with the riches of a corrupt political life that has disconnected her from the realities of struggling families around this country,” Crisafulli added.
