Trump and Clinton hurl the R-word It was the nastiest day of the general election battle so far.

RENO, Nev. — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s war of words went nuclear on Thursday, with Clinton accusing the billionaire of craven racism and Trump roaring back: Shame on you.

The charges hurled between the two presidential candidates were some of the nastiest of the election so far and showed just how vicious the next 74 days will be.


The brawl spilled into public view on Wednesday night when Trump called Clinton a “bigot” to an overwhelmingly white audience at a Mississippi rally, saying she is someone “who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.”

The Clinton camp responded — punching back 10 times harder.

First, it dropped a video Thursday morning portraying Trump as the candidate of racists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

“The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in,” a robed man identified as the Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan says.

Then, Clinton used a speech in Nevada — originally billed as an address on jobs and the economy — to methodically present her case on why Trump is a “profoundly dangerous” racist who peddles dark conspiracy theories and dog whistles.

“From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Clinton said. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”

Trump’s campaign angrily rejected Clinton’s charges, firing off a statement from pastor Mark Burns calling out Clinton for sinking to a “disgusting new low” after aides previewed Clinton’s fiery remarks. Trump himself then sliced into Clinton at his afternoon rally as a “discredited politician.”

“To Hillary Clinton and her donors and advisers, pushing her to spread smears and her lies about decent people, I have three words."

Gesturing at the cameras with his index finger, Trump intoned, "I want you to remember these three words: Shame. On. You."

The late August eruption between Clinton, at a college here, and Trump, on the other side of the country in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a striking moment that abruptly put an end to the quiet summer stretch. Clinton had spent recent days privately raising campaign cash to fund the homestretch while her rival accused of her of “hiding” as he sought to right his own campaign ship yet again by shaking up his staff and softening his language on immigration.

The hurling of insults on Thursday appeared to mark the beginning of what’s likely to be an especially brutal final 11 weeks as the presidential race escalates into more personal brawling — Clinton making the case that Trump is too divisive and unqualified for the Oval Office, Trump charging that she’s too corrupt.

“A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military,” Clinton told a hushed room.

Clinton scoffed at Trump’s recent appeals to the black community. She said Trump “misses so much” in making his case to black voters, including the “vibrancy” of black-owned businesses, the “excellence” of historically black colleges and universities and the “pride” of African-Americans watching their children thrive.

“It takes a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, ‘What do you have to lose?’” Clinton said, repeating a question Trump has asked of black voters before the mostly white audiences at his rallies. “Because the answer is everything.”

Clinton also listed the litany of controversies that have swirled around Trump’s campaign. She pointed to his initial refusal to repudiate an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and his decision to retweet a message from an anti-Semitic Twitter account. She asked the crowd to “think about” what it meant that the Republican nominee for president accused a Hispanic federal judge of being biased against him because of his heritage.

The former secretary of state also attacked Trump’s penchant for “pushing discredited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.” She cited Trump’s debunked statement that he had seen Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as well as the reality TV star’s suggestion, without evidence, that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Pulling an example from the general election, she raised how Trump had accused President Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State militant group and then “repeated that nonsense over and over.”

“This is what happens when you treat the National Enquirer like gospel,” she said. “The last thing we need in the Situation Room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and who buys so easily into racially tinged rumors.”

Clinton called out Trump’s decision to bring on Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon to be his campaign CEO, saying Breitbart’s reputation for engaging in “Alt-Right” philosophies matches with the Trump campaign.

“A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party,” Clinton said. “All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before. Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”

She pointed to Breitbart headlines like "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy," “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” and “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield” as evidence that the website once run by Bannon is out of step with the American public.

“Just imagine,” Clinton said. “Donald Trump reading that and thinking: ‘This is what I need more of in my campaign.’”

Trump was unbowed. He laid out his own case for why Clinton is corrupt, accusing her of running a “vast criminal enterprise” in which she granted Clinton Foundation donors access to power brokers through her role as secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton ran the State Department like a personal hedge fund,” Trump said. “It is hard to tell where the Clinton Foundation ended, and where the State Department began.”

But he dedicated much of his rally offering a prebuttal to Clinton’s speech, using the previews her aides had offered up to get in his blows first.

“You’re racist, you’re racist, you’re racist — they keep saying it. It’s a tired, disgusting argument” he said. “We will steadfastly reject bigotry and hatred and oppression in all of its forms."

Her speech, his campaign said, was a “desperation play” to dispense with the negative headlines over her private email server and the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and State Department that accumulated while she kept her head down, choosing instead to raise campaign cash in California — $20 million over the past three days, according to local fundraisers.

Trump kept up his own claims of bigotry during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper set to air Thursday night.

“Well, she is a bigot. If you look at what’s happening to the inner cities, you look at what’s happening to African- Americans and Hispanics in this country where she talks all the time,” Trump said. “She talks a good game. But she doesn’t do anything.”

But as Cooper tried to pin Trump down on how exactly Clinton is bigoted and where her supposed hatred of African-Americans comes from, Trump refused to directly answer the question.

“But hatred is at the core of that or dislike of African-Americans?” Cooper asked.

Trump responded, “Or maybe she’s lazy.”