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Hillary Clinton on the 2024 Race: Trump’s Rhetoric Has “Absolutely No Place in American Life”

Hillary Clinton and Katie Couric talking

Craig Hunter Ross, 2024

And her advice to Vice President Kamala Harris.

If the 2024 race can be summed up in one word, it would be “unprecedented.” Unoriginal, we know, but not untrue. To quickly recap, President Biden unexpectedly dropped out and tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him, and there have been two assassination attempts against former President Trump. Like many of us, Hillary Clinton has watched all of this unfold in awe. 

In the latest episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Clinton opened up about the campaigns amid an especially fraught political climate. While she condemned the latest apparent threat against Trump’s life as a “terrible thing,” the former secretary of state also bemoaned his rhetoric following the incident, where he accused Democrats of taking “politics in our country to a whole new level of hatred.” 

“I do worry about political violence. I worry about threats. I worry about what’s being said online about many, many people, not just the former president,” she said about Trump. “If he really is a leader, he should be doing what he can to calm the waters.”

“Let’s just all just promise ourselves that we can have significant political differences about who we want to be our next president,” she continued before adding that Trump’s words have “absolutely no place in American life.”

Clinton knows first-hand the vitriol that can come from the Trump campaign following her unexpected loss to him in 2016. And her advice to Harris’ campaign? Stay the course: “She has to stay on her message about who she is, what she wants to do, and what danger Trump poses,” she told Katie. 

That said, she remains optimistic about the country’s future and called on Americans not to sit this election out, emphasizing that “the stakes are so high, and they remain the same.”

Clinton’s comments come as she promotes her fourth memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty. The title is a riff on a lyric in Joni Mitchell’s song, “Both Sides Now,” which Clinton tells Katie is like “soundtrack to her life.” 

For more of their candid conversation and Clinton’s opinion on Trump’s enduring political strength, President Biden, and the Israel-Hamas conflict, listen to part 1 and part 2 of the interview in full.