‘Short Guy’: Hillary Clinton Brutally Mocks Height of ‘Messianic, Narcissistic, Authoritarian’ Vladimir Putin

Hillary Clinton made fun of Vladimir Putin while speaking about the Russian leader’s arrogance toward her and other women in power.

Clinton spoke with Financial Times editor Edward Luce in a lengthy interview for the FT Weekend festival in Washington. Luce asked Clinton at one point to elaborate on her past comments about how Putin would “manspread” in front of her back when she had to deal with him as secretary of state.

The audience was amused as Clinton collected her thoughts, and Luce said he was “sorry” for taking the discussion there. Clinton derided Putin as being “a short guy.”

“He obviously works out all the time because, you know, he’s got his shoulders about as broad as they can be, given his size,” she said. “And he struts around and he particularly loves to embarrass or, you know, show his disdain for women leaders.”

Clinton recalled one incident where Putin exploited former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fear of big dogs by bringing one in for a meeting they had together. That led to Clinton’s point “he always manspreaded. That’s the way he [is].”

Clinton said her own experience with Putin’s manspreading happened in 2011, when they had a meeting where Putin disparaged the United States with a “slouched-down attitude” in front of the press before sending them away. She explained how she managed to get Putin to talk with her when she engaged him on his interest in preserving Russia’s wildlife.

When Putin talked about going up to northern Russia to tag the region’s polar bears, Clinton said that he asked her “Would your husband like to go with me?”

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know his schedule, but I’ll go with you,'” Clinton explained. “Yeah. That wasn’t an invitation for me. But I mean, you could get him animated about some things.”

Clinton shared another anecdote from an APEC summit in 2012, where she got Putin to open up to her again. This time, Putin told Clinton a horrific story of how his father had to retrieve his wife from a pile of dead bodies during the invasion of Stalingrad during World War II.

“Nobody had ever heard it before,” Clinton said when she told the story to her team later. She described Putin as a “complicated, messianic, narcissistic authoritarian” who had “absolutely the wrong calculation” when he launched the invasion of Ukraine.

Watch above.

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