Hillary Clinton's High Profile Is Hurting the Democrats
Hillary Clinton was back in the news last week thanks to a Sunday speech at the PEN America World Voices Festival, which sounded custom-designed to give Donald Trump a nosebleed.
Pulling no punches, Clinton slapped Trump for his assault on such public goods as the arts, self-expression, knowledge, dissent, and basic reality. “We are living through an all-out war on truth, facts, and reason,” she declared.
But the bulk of her hits were directed at Trump’s war on the media, and the First Amendment more broadly. She lamented that “today, we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,” and who “has referred to the media as an ‘enemy of the people.’” Citing Trump’s crusades against Jeff Bezos and CNN, she asked, “Given his track record, is it any surprise that, according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them ‘talk’?” She even managed to work in a reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Considering Clinton’s own complicated relationship with
