Clinton says Trump has based his campaign on prejudice and paranoia

TWENTY years ago when Bob Dole accepted the Republican presidential nomination: “He pointed to the exits and told any racists in the party to get out,” Hillary Clinton recalled approvingly on August 25th, as she neared the end of a speech that—in effect—accused Donald Trump of beckoning bigots back in to the heart of the conservative movement. Mrs Clinton’s account of Mr Trump’s closeness to white supremacists and conspiracy theorists was both brutal and detailed: closer in tone and structure to a prosecutor’s closing argument than to a traditional campaign speech.

The Democrat started with Mr Trump’s record as a young property developer, when he was sued by the Department of Justice for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants (whose applications would be marked with a “C” for “coloured”, Mrs Clinton told her audience). Trawling through well-fished waters, she cited Mr Trump’s energetic promotion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not American-born, his claim that the Mexican government is actively sending rapists across the border and his assertion that a federal judge born in Indiana is biased against him because he is “a Mexican”. Indeed Mr Trump’s attack on a judge on the basis of his Hispanic heritage was condemned by the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, as “the textbook definition of a racist comment,” Mrs Clinton noted.

Her case for the prosecution took her audience, in Reno, Nevada, into less familiar territory, too: the twilight world of the “alt-right”, a mostly online universe of ethno-nationalists and anti-immigration populists, that is at heart little more than a gussied-up, millennial-pleasing version of old-school white supremacist prejudice. Mrs Clinton urged voters to ponder what it means that Mr Trump recently hired as his campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, the boss of Breitbart.com, a website much followed on the “alt-right”. She offered some Breitbart headlines, from “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer” to “Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.” She noted Breitbart’s contempt for mainstream conservative leaders and its many attacks on Mr Ryan, the House Speaker—a Republican who has urged his party to craft and promote policies to tackle inner-city poverty and curb racism, rather than ceding such ground to the Democrats.