Clinton campaign fires back over Trump's Philadelphia putdown
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton's campaign fired back at Donald Trump on Saturday over his characterization of Philadelphia as a city plagued by crime, poverty, and decline.
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton's campaign fired back at Donald Trump on Saturday over his characterization of Philadelphia as a city plagued by crime, poverty, and decline.
"Trump is full of insults, fear, and stereotypes that set our communities and city back and further divide our country," Rep. Robert Brady (D., Pa.), chairman of the city's Democratic Party, said in a news release circulated by the Clinton campaign.
Brady and several other Philadelphia Democrats blasted Trump in the statement. They seized on Trump's assertion Friday that Afghanistan is "safer than some of our inner cities" and that African Americans in major cities fare the worst: "They get bad education, they have no money, the jobs are a disaster, most of them don't have jobs."
Trump made those comments in an interview with the Inquirer after a campaign stop Friday on North Broad Street, where he met a small roundtable of supportive African Americans and a woman whose daughter was murdered by Newark, N.J., gang members in 2007, including one who was an undocumented immigrant. Trailing badly among minority voters - but needing to gain ground in Pennsylvania, a state critical to his electoral strategy - Trump said he would help African Americans by bringing back jobs, improving schools, and fighting crime.
Democrats said his comments were disrespectful and show he is unfit to be president.
"Donald Trump showed up in Philly for an hour-long photo op and managed to insult our entire city by suggesting Philadelphia is more like Afghanistan," said State Sen. Vincent Hughes, a Philadelphian. "Imagine him in a foreign capital trying to practice diplomacy - he's one reckless comment away from an international incident."
Trump argued that his message was resonating with African Americans fed up with failing Democratic leadership, but Pennsylvania polls show that minorities overwhelmingly support Clinton. A Franklin and Marshall poll released Thursday shows 70 percent of nonwhite voters backing Clinton, against 25 percent for Trump.
Trump on Friday said he knew Philadelphia from his time at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and said: "It's very sad to see what's going on," because "it's gotten so much worse than when I was going. It's dangerous; the crime numbers are up. Your mayor is doing a terrible job."
(Mayor Kenney, in response, called Trump a "nincompoop.")
Asked for support of his assertion that inner cities are more dangerous than Afghanistan, Trump aides cited statistics showing more murders in Chicago this year than deaths of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2013.
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