Hillary Clinton on Thursday ripped Donald Trump and said of his supporters that “maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.”
The former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that “clearly” there were some Republicans with common sense, evident by those who voted with Democrats to keep the government open.
“But I think they are intimidated” and “oftentimes … say and do things which they know better than to say or do, and it will require us defeating those most extreme measures and the people who promote them in order to try to get to some common ground where people can again work together,” said Clinton.
Clinton recalled “very strong partisans in both parties in the past” but said, “There wasn’t this little tail of extremism wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today.”
She added, “And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.”
Watch the interview here:
Amanpour asked how the cult could be broken.
Clinton acknowledged that Trump would “likely” be the Republican 2024 nominee. “We have to defeat him and we have to defeat those who are the election deniers, as we did in 2020 and 2022, and we have to just be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican Party,” she said.
Trump is the “classic tale of an authoritarian, populist who really has a grip on the emotional and psychological needs” of his base and the “Make America Great Again” slogan was “a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where people could be in charge of their lives.”
“It is like a cult and somebody has to break that momentum,” Clinton added, predicting a Biden victory in a possible 2020 replay, when “the fever will break” and the GOP can return to fighting on actual issues.