Incorrigible Hillary Airs Her Grievances
More importantly, the former secretary of state gets American foreign policy exactly backwards.
Say what you want about Donald Trump, but nobody nurses a grudge like Hillary Clinton.
In the midst of President Joe Biden’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, the Should Have Been President™ couldn’t resist sharing her vast wisdom with the commoners. And it started with whining about a stolen election. In 2016.
Putin “made it his mission to deny me the presidency,” insisted the woman who believes the presidency was her birthright, still harping on the same refrain she’s sounded time and time again over the last four and a half years. (It seems like longer than that, but we did the math.)
Clinton wants to have it both ways, too. On the one hand, she still doesn’t accept the 2016 election results, arguing that Russia tainted and orchestrated the whole thing (just never you mind her own funding of the Steele dossier or that she’s the one responsible for initiating the collusion hoax). On the other hand, she says that people arguing over the 2020 election results are “doing Putin’s work.”
“We never thought we had to worry about domestic enemies. We never thought we had to worry about people who didn’t believe in our democracy,” Clinton said. “Sadly, what we’ve seen over the last four years, and particularly since our election in 2020, is that we have people within our own country who are doing Putin’s work … to sow distrust, to sow divisiveness, to give aid and comfort to those in our country who, for whatever reason, are being not only disruptive but very dangerous.”
That is some classic Clintonian projection — casting Democrat faults onto Republicans.
But wait; there’s more of it. First, the setup: “We can’t turn the clock back, but I think what President Biden understands is he wants to sit across the table, as I have done with Putin, and basically look him in the eye and say, ‘Okay, let’s figure out where we can work together. … Let us tell you what we are no longer going to abide, and there will be consequences,’” Clinton said, adding, “‘And don’t test us.’”
After that phony macho approach, she said that conservatives “really resonate to the authoritarianism” of the Putin model because “they find that kind of macho approach to everything quite attractive.”
There’s no sin she can commit that she can’t foist onto her opponents.
This is all far more consequential than a few gotcha quotes about Hillary’s projection and grievances, though. It goes to the heart of American foreign policy.
Clinton engages in ridiculous hyperbole when saying that Trump was “a spokesperson for Putin,” though we likewise often thought that Trump’s flattery of dictators was repulsive and unhelpful. At the same time, we saw clearly that Trump’s strategy was very Teddy Roosevelt-esque: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump understood that sometimes you have to speak kindly to your opponent for the art of the deal to work. All the while, he was doing everything in his power to counter Russian (and Chinese) influence in the world. The biggest examples were that he strengthened the military, worked toward energy independence, and fought for fair trade.
To borrow Hillary’s words, he was “a president who will stand up and defend American interests.”
By contrast, Clinton and Biden prefer talking tough while acquiescing, all while knocking America down a few pegs. “Don’t test us,” Macho Hillary says they say to Putin. He’s a “killer,” Macho Joe adds. Yet Clinton undermines “our democracy” at home by destroying confidence in our elections, and Biden weakens our military both at home and abroad.
Which message do you think Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin take to heart as more beneficial for their own interests? And why would any honest person argue that Putin or Xi wanted Trump to win either election?