Hillary Clinton partially walked back comments she made on Friday night, describing half of Donald Trump's supporters as "deplorables" who were driven “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" sentiments.

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that's never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong," Clinton said in a statement released Saturday afternoon.


Clinton made the comments at a fundraising event Friday in New York City, and by the next morning the Trump campaign was demanding an apology.

The Republican nominee tweeted early on Saturday: "Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!"

“Come to an event; talk to real people who aren't donors,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway wrote in a Twitter exchange with Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. “Or better: have Hillary apologize.”

Clinton's expression of regret stopped well short of an apology, however.

"But let's be clear," she wrote, going on to rattle off a list of Trump's offenses. "[W]hat's really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values. It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people."

"I won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign," she went on, but she offered an olive branch of sorts to downscale Trump voters. "I also meant what I said last night about empathy, and the very real challenges we face as a country where so many people have been left out and left behind. As I said, many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don’t feel like the economy or our political system are working for them. I'm determined to bring our country together and make our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top."

After Clinton's statement was released, she then responded to a Trump tweet.

Except for African Americans, Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, women, veterans—and any so-called "losers" or "dummies." https://t.co/rbBg2rXZdm — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 10, 2016

Trump then released a statement Saturday afternoon: "Isn't it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her failing campaign? For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans."

The event, a gala for the group LGBT for Hillary at Cipriani Wall Street that featured Barbara Streisand, was not the first time Clinton has used the term "deplorables." But her extended riff this time drew swift and harsh condemnation from Republicans -- as well as comparisons to past presidential campaign gaffes.

Clinton’s comments came as she urged the crowd of donors not to “get complacent” after seeing “the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment” from Trump and assume, “Well, he's done this time.”

Trump has defined his campaign at times as a crusade against "political correctness" and offended minority groups with his comments about Muslims, Mexicans and African-Americans. His new campaign team — led by Conway — has sought to steer him in a more inclusive direction. Polls suggest he has made few inroads among minority voters, though he has recovered somewhat with the college-educated white voters who are crucial to any winning Republican coalition.

Clinton's campaign has hardly disguised its strategy of associating Trump with the far-right elements of his base and reminding voters of his most incendiary remarks, hoping to arrest any further improvement in his numbers.

“You know,” Clinton said at the LGBT event, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

“Right?” Clinton said as the crowd laughed and applauded.

“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it,” Clinton continued. “And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”

The Democratic nominee then sought to draw a distinction between the two halves of the “basket.”

“Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket,” she said, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change.”

These Trump supporters, Clinton said, “don't buy everything he says,” but “hold out some hope that their lives will be different” with him as president. “They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Conway was quick to criticize the comments, jabbing Clinton on Twitter for "placing people in 'baskets'" and insulting "millions of Americans."

“Treating people as subhuman - irredeemable/deplorable - is no way to run for POTUS,” tweeted Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush spokesman and fervent Trump opponent. “Dems shld skip the excuses & move straight to mea culpa.”

But Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, defended the remarks as the political furor began to rage online.

“She gave an entire speech about how the alt right movement is using his campaign to advance its hate movement,” he tweeted on Friday evening. “Obviously not everyone supporting Trump is part of the alt right, but alt right leaders are with Trump. And their supporters appear to make up half his crowd when you observe the tone of his events."

In a statement later released by the Trump campaign, senior communications adviser Jason Miller said Clinton's comments "revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans."

"What’s truly deplorable isn’t just that Hillary Clinton made an inexcusable mistake in front of wealthy donors and reporters happened to be around to catch it," he wrote. "It’s that Clinton revealed just how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, "By referring to millions of Americans as ‘deplorables’ and ‘irredeemable,’ Hillary Clinton is showing her outright contempt for ordinary people and proving yet again why Americans overwhelmingly regard her as dishonest and untrustworthy."

Clinton, who has seen polls tighten with Trump nationally and in key swing states in recent weeks, has made a renewed push for bipartisan support, touting endorsements from conservative figures and courting Republican donors who find the GOP nominee unpalatable.

The comments reminded some of Mitt Romney's remark in the 2012 presidential campaign -- also at a fundraiser -- that he didn't worry about the "47 percent" of voters who would vote for Democrats in exchange for government handouts.

Others pointed to then Sen. Barack Obama's strikingly similar 2008 comment -- again, captured at a donor event -- that small-town voters "cling to guns or religion,” which Republicans said showed contempt for ordinary Americans.

“The parallel is disdain for the unwashed,” tweeted conservative columnist Tim Carney.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them,” Obama said then. “And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama was pilloried for those comments, including by none other than his Democratic primary opponent at the time, Hillary Clinton.

She ripped him as "elitist" and cast him as someone who couldn't possibly fathom the struggles of "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans."