Bill Clinton has had it up to here with the dark rhetoric coming from GOP nominee Donald Trump’s campaign.
“We have problems but we have unlimited promise,” the former president said Monday at a campaign stop at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “I am so tired of hearing the other side tell me how America is going to hell in a handbasket.”
Clinton continued, listing all the positives in the American economy while challenging Trump’s oft-repeated assertion that the United States is losing on every front.
This isn’t the first time the America’s 42nd president has blasted the Trump campaign’s rhetoric.
Clinton has criticized the GOP nominee’s slogan (“Make America great again!”) repeatedly as being an explicit dog whistle to white Southerners, even though the former commander in chief himself used the term when he ran for president in 1992.
“I’m a white Southerner, I remember what it was like when somebody said they were going to make America great again,” Clinton said last week at a campaign stop in Indianola, Iowa. “They’re basically said, ‘Here’s your tobacco, here’s your shotgun, you’re in charge.'”
Earlier, in September, he told a crowd in Pittsburgh, “One candidate says, ‘I’ll make America great again. Hey, folks. I’m a white Southerner. I know exactly what that means.”
When the GOP nominee says he wants to “make America great again,” what he is really saying is, “‘I will give you what you had 50 years ago in the economy and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and give you somebody to look down on,'” Clinton said.
“One person is making you mad every day and says, ‘Blame somebody else,'” said the former president, who was born and raised in Arkansas. “And I grew up among the people who seem to like that the best.”
Clinton has also grown bolder in his unflattering descriptions of the GOP nominee’s base.
“The other guy’s base is what I grew up in,” Clinton said last week at a campaign stop in Fort Myers, Fla. “You know, I’m basically your standard redneck.”
Though the former president uses less-than-glowing descriptions when talking about his opponent’s supporters, it’s usually done in the broader context of saying he grew up with those people, so he understands and empathizes with their anger and their concerns.
On Monday, the former president continued to argue that the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, particularly its slogan, is the last thing American voters need right now.
“It is exactly the wrong message for you,” Clinton said Monday.
“First of all, I turned 70 this year, so ‘Make America Great Again’ is like me saying I’d like to be 20 again. Actually, I would,” he said to laughs. “But I would not vote for someone who promised to make me 20 again.”
