In what seemed like an action replay segment of their epic electoral battle, President Donald Trump has once again slammed his former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, this time round for blaming everyone else except herself for her stunning electoral defeat last November.
Trump’s comments came in the wake of excerpts from Clinton’s new book, titled ‘What Happened’, in which she has criticized, apart from Trump, a host of persons, including former FBI Director James Comey, the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia and her Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders for damaging her White House bid.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton blames everybody (and everything) but herself for her election loss. She lost the debates and lost her direction!” Trump tweeted on Wednesday night. “The ‘deplorables’ came back to haunt Hillary. They expressed their feelings loud and clear. She spent big money but, in the end, had no game!” he said, harking back to Clinton’s one-time characterisation of his supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.
In the book, which runs into nearly 500 pages, Clinton has described Trump as ‘the perfect Trojan Horse for Putin’ and goes on to say that Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election has been more serious than the Watergate scandal that ousted former President Richard Nixon in 1974.
As for Putin, Clinton writes that he had a “personal vendetta against me and deep resentment toward the United States”.
And slamming Comey as the “rash FBI director” who turned the White House race “upside down” by informing Congress that he was reopening the investigation into her emails just days before the election, she writes: “If not for those decisions, everything would have been different.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, reacting to Clinton’s comments, said: “I think it’s sad that after Hillary Clinton ran one of the most negative campaigns in history and lost, and the last chapter of her public life is now going to be defined by propping up book sales with false and reckless attacks.”
Clinton, in an interview to National Public Radio ahead of the book release, said she would continue to raise voices for the people. “I’m going to keep talking, and trying to raise the questions that I hope Americans will take seriously, and that I hope the press will take seriously, because we’ve got a lot of choppy water ahead of us,” she said.