The “What Happened?” speaking tour continues unabated, much to everyone’s chagrin, and with each new audience, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton comes up with new and more novel excuses as to why she not only lost the 2016 election, but why she’s been rendered impotent within her own party.
This time around, the Daily Mail reports, Clinton’s laying the blame on Fox News, internet conspiracy theorists who believed she and her campaign chair John Podesta were at the head of an international child trafficking ring, and Vladimir Putin.
Speaking to The Wing, an exclusive New York City club for professional women, Clinton tore into Democrats, as well, suggesting that “Resistance” marches and social media messaging were pointless if the same people who donned “Pussy Hats” and posted memes about gun violence weren’t also casting ballots.
She admitted that it is “very hard’ to watch Trump be president,” but that she realized “it couldn’t be paralyzing.”
She did warn that Americans have not “seen the bottom yet” on Trump’s agenda, though it’s not clear precisely what she objects to. So far, Trump has governed largely like a moderate Republican, with only occasional dalliances into hard-line conservatism. He appointed a conservative judge to the Supreme Court and presided over tax cuts, but also approved a trillion-dollar budget with massive increases in domestic spending. So far, he’s even on pace to demand fewer deportations that Clinton’s former boss, President Barack Obama.
She also dinged Trump for not doing more about “misogynistic” Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps failing to recall that she, as Obama’s Secretary of State, initialized a “friendship” overture with the increasingly despotic leader in pursuit of an American-Russian “reset.”
Without skipping a beat, Clinton, of course, laid the blame for her loss squarely on others, this time claiming that Fox News was trying to derail her presidential hopes and that the network has waged an “impeachment” campaign against her even as she’s been out of the limelight.
And, strangely, Clinton even hit out at “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists: internet “sleuths” who determined that she and her impossibly inept campaign chair, John Podesta, along with other political leaders, were running a child sex ring out of a D.C. pizza parlor. The allegations were unbelievable, and relegated mostly to the darker corners of the web, but Clinton is convinced that voters thought she was personally trafficking children — and that’s why they didn’t turn out for her.
“It spread like wildfire,” she said of the the theory. “You look and that and think, that’s ridiculous. But you have no idea how many people will believe things that are presented as news.”
Sadly for Clinton, it seems despite Russia’s best efforts, “fake news” did not sway the election in any meaningful way.