Failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday launched yet another over-the-top attack on President Donald Trump, the Russians, sexism, and any other explanation — besides herself — for her loss.
Clinton’s latest platform was the Jacob Javits Center in New York, where her campaign victory party was to be. She was promoting an upcoming memoir that she promised would offer an “unvarnished view” of what happened in the 2016 election.
“I’m going to do everything I can to support the resistance. That’s gonna be my mission.”
“It’s about what happened to us and how much more alert we need to be as a nation,” she said. “And I’m obviously particularly concerned about the role that Russia played and the very serious interference that we know they were responsible for in our most fundamental democratic act.”
It is Clinton’s third public appearance in the last week in which she has practiced blame-avoidance. During a commencement address at her alma mater at Wellesley College, she compared Trump to disgraced former President Richard Nixon. At a forum Wednesday, she said she was the victim of a coordinated interference effort carried out by 1,000 Russian agents and insinuated that the Trump campaign must have helped the Russians target voters during the campaign.
On Thursday at a BookExpo America event on C-SPAN, Clinton said she was afraid for her country.
“We’re living in such an abnormal time when we look at the way this White House is behaving about some of the biggest challenges that we face, the dishonesty and fabrication and whether you call it fake news or lies — pick your choice — it is deeply troubling,” she said.
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She added that it is “worrisome that it could cause lasting damage to our institutions.”
Clinton blamed Trump for all manner of ills, sometimes explicitly, other times by insinuation. She talked of her experiences in countries that have experienced genocide and drew a link to the current political debate in America.
“We saw it in Bosnia, where it was deliberately intended to inflame neighbor against neighbor. We saw it in Rwanda,” she said. “I’ve seen it in many other places where political leaders ,for their own purposes, their own power, greed, ideology, religion, whatever it might be, really light those flames. And there’s always kindling there.”
Clinton decried an assault on a train in Oregon last week in which a man spouting racial slurs allegedly killed two men who had come to the defense of a Muslim woman. Clinton said it was symptomatic of a larger problem involving the fraying of societal norms that make it possible for people of diverse backgrounds to live with one another.
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“What I saw in this election was a deliberate effort to blow the top off of that, to basically say, ‘Whatever feeling you have, whatever, you know, resentment, however angry you might be, get out there and express it,'” she said. “And it’s okay to take it out on other people, verbally or physically, as we saw during the campaign. That is incredibly dangerous. You know, that is unleashing a level of vitriol and defensiveness, hatred that I don’t think we should tolerate.”
Clinton showed no more willingness to accept responsibility for her own defeat. Asked about advice to a future female candidate for president, she said she would urge her to recognize what she is getting into.
“That’s not to say that, you know, men don’t get harsh treatment and put in the spotlight. But you’re carrying the burden of the double standard. And you have to know that,” she said. “In my book, I take on the issues of sexism and misogyny and talk about it, because we need to pull it out and put it in the bright light. And it may be uncomfortable for some people to read how I experienced it, what I believe about it.”
Clinton repeated a vow she has made in other settings to oppose Trump.
“I’m going to do everything I can to support the resistance,” she said. “That’s gonna be my mission.”
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