Kaine ties Trump to ‘Ku Klux Klan values’

Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine tied Donald Trump’s values in with those of the Ku Klux Klan as he and Hillary Clinton attack him over racial issues.

“Ku Klux Klan values, David Duke values, Donald Trump values are not American values,” he said during a voter registration event in Tallahassee, Fla., Friday.

{mosads}“They’re not our values. And we’ve got to do all we can to fight to push back and win, to say we’re still about heading toward that North Star that we set out so long ago.”

Kaine, a Virginia senator, criticized Trump for his missteps with various minorities.

“You’ve heard during the campaign he’s ridiculed people with disabilities,” he said. “He’s ridiculed people … if they were of Mexican-American origin.”

“He has said that anybody who’s a Muslim should be treated as second-class religiously,” Kaine added. “That’s not the way we do things in this country. It’s not the way we do things.”

Kaine also slammed Trump for previously casting doubt on whether President Obama was born in the U.S.

“Donald Trump was the main guy behind the scurrilous and I would say bigoted notion that President Obama wasn’t even born in this country, and Donald Trump has continued to push that irresponsible falsehood from – all the way up to now, and that’s the difference in this election and the stakes.”

The chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday said Kaine crossed a line by comparing Trump with the KKK.

“Tim Kaine sunk to new lows with dirty and deplorable attacks which have no place in this campaign,” Reince Priebus said in a statement.

“No matter how desperate he is to distract from his running mate Hillary Clinton’s litany of corruption scandals, there is no excuse for these vile and baseless smears.”

Clinton and Trump escalated their fight for minority voters this week with a series of attacks over race.

Trump on Wednesday accused Clinton of being a “bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.”

“She’s going to do nothing for African-Americans, she’s going to do nothing for Hispanics,” he said in Jackson, Miss.

Clinton on Thursday struck back, arguing Trump leads a “radical fringe” intent on stirring up America’s racial tensions.

“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 for government or command our military,” she said in Reno, Nev.

This story was updated at 7:19 p.m.