Hillary Clinton Rips Bernie Sanders: ‘Nobody Likes Him,’ He Supports ‘Bernie Bros’ Attacking ‘Particularly Women’
Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential popular vote victor Hillary Clinton buried Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, excoriating him for supporting “online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.”
In a new Hollywood Reporter interview to support the upcoming Hulu docuseries Hillary, Secretary Clinton pulled very few punches about Sanders, whom she defeated in the 2016 Democratic primary before losing the general election to now-President Donald Trump.
The interviewer asked Clinton about a brutal quote from the series, asking “In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: ‘He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.’ That assessment still hold?”
“Yes, it does,” she replied.
Clinton went on to accuse Sanders of supporting “Bernie Bros” who attack “particularly women,” and weighed in on the recent controversy over Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s accusation that Sanders told her a woman could not beat Trump:
If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?
I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.
Speaking of, he allegedly told Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2018 that he didn’t think a woman could win, a statement he vigorously denies. How did you digest that?
Well, number one, I think [that sentiment] is untrue, which we should all say loudly. I mean, I did get more votes both in the primary, by about 4 million, and in the general election, by about 3 million. I think that both the press and the public have to really hold everybody running accountable for what they say and what their campaign says and does. That’s particularly true with what’s going on right now with the Bernie campaign having gone after Elizabeth with a very personal attack on her. Then this argument about whether or not or when he did or didn’t say that a woman couldn’t be elected, it’s part of a pattern. If it were a one-off, you might say, “OK, fine.” But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me. I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration.
Clinton went on to say that she’s talked to most of the candidates running this year… but not Sanders.
