Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned Saturday that President Donald Trump would be very hard to beat unless Democrats impeached him before the 2020 election.
“It’s hard to know who’s going to be the best candidate to beat this president, assuming this president is still running,” she said, prompting laughter in the audience.
She added:We have a number of very able, very admirable candidates who are vying for the nomination, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of forecasters who are saying, ‘Look, if the economy stays in good shape and he’s not impeached, or he’s impeached but not convicted, it’s going to be very, very hard,’ because of all of the advantages that he will have on the stuff we were just talking about like suppression and everything else.
Clinton commented on impeachment during a book promotion event at Portland’s Revolution Hall with author Cheryl Strayed in Oregon.
“I just feel so strongly that what’s going on with the impeachment inquiry was not a choice, it was an obligation,” she said, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to move forward on impeachment.
Clinton indicated she believed it was a real possibility that Republicans in Congress who might turn on Trump during the impeachment inquiry, forcing him out of office.
“A lot of them have announced that they are not going to run for re-election,” Clinton said, referring to Republican members of Congress who might feel more responsibility to oppose the president.
She said it was still unclear who was the Democrat candidate best prepared to face Trump in the 2020 election.
“All that matters is that we win,” she said. “I hate to be so, you know, simplistic about it.”
When some in the audience shouted that she should run for president, she laughed and said “thank you!” but did not rule out another run.
Clinton warned all of the candidates to prepare for an onslaught of negative attention.
“We have to vet them because believe me, they make up stuff about you and you got to be in a position where the public and the press don’t fall for that again,” she warned.
She did not specifically mention former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, but it was significantly challenged after President Trump raised questions about Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings in China and Ukraine.
Any Democrat presidential candidate, she said, had to withstand the “brutal attacks” from “the right, and the Russians, and all their allies.”
Clinton conceded that any candidate had to be able to win the electoral college, not just the popular vote as she did.
“At the end of the day, as I know better than anybody and as Al Gore knows, that is not the game, you gotta win the electoral vote,” she said.
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