Says, ‘I Really Deplore His Tone’

Hillary Clinton has directly responded to Donald Trump’s recent use of a vulgar term to describe her, telling the Des Moines Register that she “deplores” the tone of GOP frontrunner but is no longer surprised by his insults.

“I really deplore the tone of his campaign, the inflammatory rhetoric that he is using to divide people, and his going after groups of people with hateful, incendiary rhetoric,” she said in an interview. “Nothing really surprises me anymore. I don’t know that he has any boundaries at all. His bigotry, his bluster, his bullying have become his campaign. And he has to keep sort of upping the stakes and going even further.”

Clinton wouldn’t say whether he believes Trump has targeted her with offensive language because she is a woman. “I don’t respond to him personally, because he thrives on that kind of exchange,” she said in the interview. “I think he has to answer for what he says, and I assume that others will make the larger point about his language. It’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism. Again, I’m not sure anybody’s surprised that he keeps pushing the envelope.”

The GOP frontrunner blasted Clinton in a tweet early Wednesday, accusing her of playing the “women being degraded card” and suggesting that a recent campaign trail moment – when Clinton offered comfort to a young girl with asthma who had been bullied at school – was staged.