Last night, Hillary Clinton popped back up on cable television in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Hillary and self-awareness have yet to be seen in the same room.
As if scripted by #Resist Twitter, Clinton took her seat on MSNBC’s set immediately after the grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., indicted Donald Trump, along with 18 other defendants, over his alleged scheme to overturn 2020 presidential-election results in the state. Clinton and Maddow, understandably giddy about the turn of events, used most of the interview to discuss the man who beat Hillary in 2016.
“If bad actors tell us falsely that every election is stolen and that the only way an election is trustworthy is if they come out on top of it, it tells you something not just about that person or that moment,” Maddow said to Clinton. “It maybe wounds us as a democracy in a way that is hard to repair.”
Maddow is right of course, but she’s one of the worst people to be making that argument, and Clinton is one of the worst people to be looking to for approval while making it. In fact, Maddow might as well have been talking about herself and her guest.
Since November 2016, Clinton has time and again made excuses for her loss. In May 2019, she told an audience the election had been stolen from her. In September of that year, she said Trump “knows he [was] an illegitimate president,” and, taking a page out of the Stacey Abrams playbook, alleged the Trump campaign engaged in “voter suppression and voter purging” to hand their man the win. She predicted that eventually the American people would “see how illegitimate his victory actually was.” Maybe the worst example came in an October 2020 Atlantic interview with Edward-Isaac Dovere:
Dovere: If Biden does win, why shouldn’t Republicans and Trump supporters spend the next four years the same way that many Democrats have: talking about resistance, marching in the streets, saying Trump is not a legitimate president?
Clinton: You didn’t see that after [George W. Bush] was elected, even though it was contentious and decided by the Supreme Court. No, there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened.
Actually, we did see that after Bush was elected, and Hillary should know. After all, she’s the one who compared the 2000 result to an actually rigged election in Nigeria. (Maddow, for her part, was a leading proponent of the idea that Russia won the 2016 contest for Trump, even through the release of the Durham Report).
That’s not all. In another display of obliviousness during the Maddow interview, Clinton said that “at the core of [Trumpism] is a set of beliefs about Americans who are entitled to rule, and the rest of us. And the rest of us is a pretty big group.”
I don’t know about you, but the former first lady who rode her husband’s high approval rating into the Senate and then twice sought, unsuccessfully, to be anointed president seems like someone who feels pretty “entitled to rule” to me.