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06:49 GMT
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (KUNA) -- As the date for the November presidential election approaches, both the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican counterpart Donald Trump upped the ante, exchanging verbal blows and accusations during a number of televised interviews in their bid to win the race for the White House.
From the start, Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia, Clinton said during an MSNBC interview.
It is "deeply disturbing" that he is taking hate groups that lived in the dark regions of the Internet, and making them mainstream, thus helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party, she said.
Trump questioned the citizenship of President Barack Obama; has a disturbing pattern of courting white supremacists; has been sued for housing discrimination against communities of color; has attacked a judge for his Mexican heritage; and has promised a mass deportation force, Clinton said.
"What I want to make clear is this -- a man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids, and these kinds of white supremacist, white nationalist, anti-Semitic groups -- should never run our government or command our military," she said. "If he does not respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?"
Clinton said, "I am reaching out to everyone -- Republicans, Democrats, independents -- everyone who is as troubled as I am by the bigotry and divisiveness of Donald Trump's campaign."
This is not a normal choice between a Republican and a Democrat, she said.
"We are not just discussing our different views on tax policy or anything else of importance," said the former secretary of state. "We are facing a divisive candidate whose loose-cannon temperament and his complete lack of preparation make him unqualified to be president and temperamentally unfit to be commander-in-chief."
In a CNN interview on Thursday night, Trump again accused Clinton of being a bigot.
"She is a bigot because you look at what is happening to the inner cities, you look at what is happening to African-Americans and Hispanics in this country, where she talks all of the time," Trump said. "Look at the vets (US military veterans), where she said the vets are being treated essentially just fine, that it is over-exaggerated what is happening to the vets."
Asked to explain how Clinton was bigoted, since that means she would have hatred toward a particular group, Trump said, "Because she is selling them down the tubes. Because she is not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game, but she doesn't do anything."
Asked if he was accusing Clinton of having hatred or dislike of black people, Trump said, "Her policies are bigoted because she knows they are not going to work." (end)
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