DURHAM, N.H. — The day after Donald Trump declined to correct an anti-Muslim voter at his town hall who identified President Obama as a Muslim and not an American, Hillary Clinton said she was “appalled” by Trump's “prejudiced,” “discriminatory” non-response — and called on the candidate to "start behaving like a president, to show respect, and to stand up for the truth.”
Clinton told reporters here on Friday that, had she been in Trump's place, she would have told the voter to "quit impugning the integrity of the president."
The moment Trump heard the remark, Clinton said, he should have “repudiated that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness in a questioner, in an audience that he was appearing before.” What’s more, she said, Trump should have made clear that the statement was factually incorrect: Obama is an American citizen and a practicing Christian. “He knew, or he should have known, that what that man was asking was not only way out of bounds — it was untrue,” Clinton said.
The Democratic candidate made the remarks on Friday afternoon at the University of New Hampshire following a campaign forum to promote her plan to make college more affordable and relieve student debt. Clinton appeared alongside the state's governor, Maggie Hassan, who officially offered her endorsement.
The night before, not far from here in New Hampshire, Trump appeared at the town hall where an attendee said, “We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. Our current president is one. We know he’s not even an American,” said a questioner at a town hall in New Hampshire. “We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question, when can we get rid of them?”
Trump, who in recent years has fueled theories that Obama was not born in the United States, promised the voter that he would be “looking at that and a lot of different things” in his campaign.
Asked if the exchange was racist, Clinton said, “I think it’s prejudiced. I think it’s discriminatory. I think it comes out of the same unfortunate reservoir of hateful rhetoric that we’ve seen too much of where people are being set against one another. And that has no place in our politics.”
How would Clinton have responded to the voter, had he been at one of her town halls? “Well, I don’t think that person would have come to my event,” she told reporters.
“But if that person had been at my event, I would have called him out on it. And I would have said, from the very beginning: ‘That has no place in a political discussion like the one we’re trying to have here. And not only is it out of place and wrong. It is totally, factually untrue… quit impugning the integrity of the president.”
Clinton also said she agreed with Sen. Lindsey Graham, another Republican presidential candidate, who told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Friday that Trump should go on national television to apologize. “I hope he does,” Clinton said. “I hope he will take Senator Graham’s advice and request and do just that.”
When told that Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was claiming that the candidate didn’t hear the voter’s question correctly, Clinton called on Trump to clarify the point himself. “He should address that,” she said.
“We can all have differences. That’s what elections are about,” Clinton told reporters before wrapping up her first event of the day on Friday. “That’s all fair game. But we have a bigger obligation to the American people to try to have a campaign that is about what’s really going on in the lives of Americans, and to do everything we can to eliminate from our political discourse the kind of comments that we heard yesterday.”