The former Democratic nominee spoke bitterly about the president during a 25th anniversary celebration of her husband's election in Little Rock, Ark.
Former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Saturday described President Donald Trump as “obsessed” with her continued public presence.
“Apparently, you know, my former opponent is obsessed with my speaking out,” Clinton said in an appearance alongside her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at a forum in Little Rock, Arkansas, commemorating the 25th anniversary of his election. “Apparently there was another, somebody told me, tweet today. Honestly, between tweeting and golfing, how does he get anything done? I don’t understand it. Maybe that’s the whole point.”
Trump revived his “Crooked Hillary” moniker via Twitter on Saturday morning, claiming that his vanquished general election opponent is the “worst (and biggest) loser of all time.”
“She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Republican Party,” the president tweeted. “Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!”
Clinton said in her Little Rock speech she wouldn’t be silenced. “I’m gonna keep speaking out,” she said.
She dominated Saturday’s conversation, which was moderated by James Carville, a Bill Clinton campaign veteran and Hillary Clinton campaign adviser.
She criticized the current administration for pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, failing to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program and promoting what she called the “fairy tale” that trickle-down economics will “make everything great.”
“Yeah, we may be cutting Medicare and Medicaid and health care and make it more expensive to go to school and all the stuff that they’re trying to do in Washington, but it’s all gonna work out,” she said sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense.”
She also mocked Trump for his approach to foreign policy, contrasting his Twitter diplomacy to her husband’s approach to international issues.
“There was nothing fast and easy about it,” she said. “He didn’t tweet about it. He got to work about it, and he actually got it done.”
While Clinton appeared to take ownership for her unexpected loss last November, she also blamed what she maintained was the “perfect storm” of outside factors, including Russia’s election meddling and former FBI director James Comey’s 11th-hour decision to publicize the bureau’s late examination of emails related to her use of a private server during her time as secretary under President Barack Obama.
Clinton, who lost the election despite winning nearly 3 million more popular votes, told Mother Jones in an interview published Friday that “there are lots of questions about” the legitimacy of Trump’s election.
In a separate interview Friday, Clinton told WABC’s Rita Cosby that there is nothing she admires about Trump’s presidency.
“The answer is absolutely no,” she said. “I didn’t think he’d be as bad as he turned out to be.”
And while much of her rhetoric reflected on her and her husband’s experience in the 1992 campaign and the next eight years in the White House, she repeatedly knocked Trump and his administration.
“There is no such thing as an alternative fact,” she said at one point, referencing the term White House counselor Kellyanne Conway coined. “It does not exist — in politics or in nature. And it was astonishing to me the things people believed about me in this campaign.
Clinton recalled voters telling the people who knocked on doors for her: “Well, I can’t support her. She killed somebody; I can’t support her. She runs a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizzeria.”
“Oh yeah,” she said they would reply when others said such rumors weren’t true: “’I saw it on the Internet.’”
Clinton said when she talks about “What Happened,” the title of her 2016 memoir, she’s “very focused on making sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“So that’s why I am speaking out and going to continue to speak out, and I’m going to do everything I can to try to have an election in 2018 that’s about real things,” she said.