In recent weeks, Hillary Clinton has been dropping hints that she might make a third try for the White House in 2020, to which President Donald Trump retorted on Tuesday in a tweet, “I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren.”
Trump added, “Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her high crimes and misdemeanors including how and why she deleted 33,000 Emails AFTER getting “C” Subpoena!” The C stands for Congress. Clinton insisted that the deleted e-mails were of personal business, such as her daughter Chelsea’s wedding, but of the e-mails that were found, at least 100 contained classified pieces of information — a violation of federal law.
Hillary shot back on the PBS News Hour on Tuesday during an interview. “Nothing has been more examined and looked at than my emails, we all know that. So, he’s either lying or delusional, or both. There was no subpoena as he says in a tweet this morning, so, maybe there does need to be a rematch.”
She added, “I mean, obviously, I can beat him again.”
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Of course, Clinton did not win the 2016 election, as Trump received 306 electoral votes to 232 for Clinton, and carried 30 of 50 states. Arguing that she beat Trump and “won” the election because she officially won 48 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Trump is sort of like a football team arguing that they really won a game they lost on the scoreboard because they had 70 more total yards during the game. Obviously, if the rules of football stated that the winner was whichever team got more yards, the game strategy would be entirely different. The same with a presidential election.
While Clinton claims that there was no subpoena, the FBI discovered that her supposedly private e-mails were deleted less than a month after she did receive a congressional subpoena for them.
Despite her boasts that she could beat Trump “again,” the facts are that she has now lost two presidential runs. In 2008, as the clear front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination, she lost the party’s nod to a one-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Then, in 2016, even with the Democratic National Committee doing all it could to tilt the race for her, she barely won the nomination over a socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who was not even a registered Democrat, but rather an Independent.
In the fall campaign, Clinton blew a huge lead in the polls to lose to Trump. She neglected to campaign in midwestern states such as Wisconsin, believing that she had that state in the bag, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Whether she would run a better race this time and defeat Trump is debatable. In fact, it is unlikely that she could even win the nomination over Biden, Warren, Sanders, and the rest of the Democratic Party field.
One must wonder why Clinton thinks she would defeat Trump this time around. After all, Trump has presided over an economic boom, with the national unemployment rate now the lowest it has been in a half-century. Black and Hispanic unemployment rates are at record lows, and polling indicates that Trump’s support among those two voting blocs is up over what it was at the time of the last presidential election. While Clinton could no doubt count on the votes of almost all Democrats, Trump could no doubt count on an even higher percentage of the Republican vote than last time, having delivered on some key Republican issues, such as judicial appointments. Finally, Trump’s support among “Independent” voters is running significantly higher in the polls than it was during the previous election.
Trump’s war chest is going to be much larger than in 2016, and the public has been given a taste of what Democratic governance would look like, with the obsession of the House of Representatives with impeachment and attacks upon Trump, along with demands to raise taxes and spend unrealistic sums of money on the Green New Deal, paying off student loans, and other pandering schemes.
Were Hillary Clinton somehow to get the Democratic nomination, she could only take it after a bruising battle, leaving deep wounds within the Democratic Party.
But a Trump vs. Clinton rematch would certainly be interesting, and would probably make the previous election look like a love-fest.
Photo: AP Images
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and author of several books, including History’s Greatest Libels, a challenge to the falsehoods told about historical personalities such as Thomas Jefferson, Joseph McCarthy, Clarence Thomas, and Christopher Columbus. He can be contacted at [email protected].
