LAS VEGAS — Hillary Clinton on Sunday offered a bleak assessment of President Trump’s relations with Vladimir Putin, saying the American leader is getting “played” by the Russian president on a range of issues.
Appearing with former President Bill Clinton at a Las Vegas casino theater in the finale of the couple’s monthslong paid speaking tour, Hillary Clinton said Putin’s KGB background allowed him to mentally size up — and manipulate — Trump over the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 campaign, nuclear talks with North Korea, and a range of other issues.
“I don’t understand exactly the pull out Putin has over him,” said Clinton, who served as secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s first term, after eight years as a senator from New York. “A lot of these tough guys on the international scene expect you to push back. Right now, we are ceding so much territory to him.”
[Read: Trump has hourlong talk with Putin about Mueller report, Venezuela, nukes]
Hillary Clinton, 71, has time to deliver paid speeches after losing the 2016 presidential race to Trump, a businessman and celebrity who had never before held public office. She’s a frequent Twitter and verbal target of Trump. He’s repeatedly taunted her for coming up short in a race virtually all the punditry corp and analysts expected her to walk away with.
Her barbs against Trump in Las Vegas were actually a notch milder than her appearance Saturday night with Bill Clinton in Los Angeles, Calif. At that event Hillary Clinton said she is advising candidates about what it is like to have an election “stolen.”
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton said at the L.A. event. Clinton’s 2016 campaign was targeted by Russian interference efforts, which included stolen emails from her campaign chairman that were leaked to the public, and a social media disinformation effort.
On Sunday night the Park MGM hotel theater, which hosted their Las Vegas appearance, appeared about 70% filled. Tickets that had been advertised for hundreds of dollars were, shortly before show time, slashed to the low double digits. Most of the Clintons’ appearances have pulled in less-than-capacity audiences. Their opening night, in Toronto last fall, filled only about half of available seats.
Both Clintons find themselves far less popular in the public eye than the relatively recent past. Bill Clinton left the White House in January 2001 riding high on a record of impressive economic growth over his term, a world relatively at peace and approval ratings among the highest of recent commanders-in-chief in his era.
Bill Clinton’s popularity grew during the George W. Bush White House years, as the most recent point of comparison for a Democratic president. His bipartisan travels with former President George H.W. Bush on disaster relief in the South Pacific and Haiti only heightened his allure.
But Hillary Clinton’s twin failures trying to succeed him as president — losing the 2008 Democratic nomination to Barack Obama and 2016 general election to Trump — took some of the luster off his reputation. And in the #MeToo era, Democratic partisans are much less forgiving over his Oval Office dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. Calls for impeachment of Trump inevitably lead to comparisons of Bill Clinton’s 1998-99 saga that left his uncomfortably close to prematurely exiting the Oval Office.
Still, Hillary Clinton on Sunday used every opportunity on stage to blast Trump and his administration.
“This president obstructed justice,” she said about special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent Russia report. “He tried to interfere with that investigation.”
Hillary Clinton also said her gender — in 2016 she became the first woman nominated to lead a major party presidential ticket — led to unfair treatment of her in public life.
She cited that as a reason Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., last week suggested it’s to begin investigating Clinton and others. An FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email server while secretary of state ended in 2016. More than 30,000 emails were deleted from the server, with 5,000 ultimately recovered. Clinton had said she “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified,” but the FBI found more than 100 emails that did contain classified information.
“It’s sort of a perverse form of flattery that these guys cannot get over me,” she said. “They’ve been going after me for 25 years and it really annoys them that I’m still standing.”
She added wistfully about her Capitol Hill tenure, “I don’t recognize some of the people I served with in the Senate on the other side of the aisle.”
The Clintons’ Las Vegas appearance was hyped on the Strip around shows featuring Janet Jackson and Cher. The pair can actually claim some enduring popularity in the Silver State. Bill Clinton won Nevada in 1992 and 1996, and Hillary Clinton claimed it for her column in her 2016 loss. In the 2008 Nevada Democratic Caucus, she and rival Barack Obama came out about even.
