Hillary Clinton Calls for ‘Formal Deprogramming’ of Trump Supporters

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a panel at the Vital Voices Global Festival in Washington, on May 5, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the reeducation of supporters of former President Donald Trump during a CNN interview on Thursday.

The former Democratic presidential nominee who lost to President Trump in 2016 told Christiane Amanpour that though there have always been “bitter battles over all kinds of things” between Republicans and Democrats, there wasn’t “this little tail of extremism wagging the dog of the Republican party as it is today.”

“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,” she said.

Referring to his legal issues, Ms. Clinton said he’s “only in it for himself.”

“He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions, and when do they break with him?” she asked. “Because at some point—you know—maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. Something needs to happen.”

When Ms. Amanpour asked Ms. Clinton how this could be done given that he could be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, she replied, “At this point, I think sadly he will still be the nominee, and 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 be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican party.”

‘Basket of Deplorables’

Ms. Clinton has criticized President Trump’s stance on the 2020 election being stolen—a stance for which he is facing federal charges—while she herself has stated multiple times that the 2016 election was stolen, yet she faces no charges.

“I believe he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she told Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning in 2019. “He knows. He knows there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did, and I take responsibility for those parts of it that I should, but Jane, it was like applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado.”

Despite special counsel John Durham’s May report not only debunking Ms. Clinton’s allegation that President Trump conspired with Russians to steal the election but also pointing to her documented intent to “vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin,” she continues to blame the Russian president for her election loss and claims Russians are determined to infiltrate U.S. elections.

“I don’t think despite all of the deniers there’s any doubt that he interfered in our election or that he has interfered in many ways in the internal affairs of other countries,” Mrs. Clinton said. “He hates democracy, and he especially hates the West, and he especially hates us. I fear that the Russians have proved themselves to be quite adept at interfering, and if he has a chance, he’ll do it again.”

Her call for deprogramming echoed her 2016 sentiment when she expressed disdain for Trump supporters who are largely in the middle class.

“You can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call a basket of deplorables,” she said at a campaign event. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. And, unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”

To critics, her views are representative of the Democratic Party’s disconnect and disdain for many everyday Americans in its entanglement with elite and corporate self-interests.

Most recently in Mississippi, current Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented on Mrs. Clinton’s characterization of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” and the Democratic  party’s willingness to suspend constitutional rights to serve its own interests.

“It has an antipathy toward the American middle class,” he said. “I don’t think it was an accident when Hillary Clinton referred to people as deplorable. I see that sentiment a lot. It’s become a party that is opposed to freedom of speech, and that is tolerant of government-enforced censorship.”

In the CNN Primetime interview, Ms. Clinton told Ms. Amanpour that there are some “sane” Republicans in the House, but that they are afraid of other members.

“You saw the number of Republicans who voted along with Democrats to keep the government open, so there’s clearly a commonsense, sane part of the Republican caucus in the House,” she said. “But I think they are intimidated. They oftentimes, you know, 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.”

MAGA Responds

Though President Trump himself has not yet commented on Ms. Clinton’s statement on deprogramming MAGA Republicans as of this writing, the Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC issued this statement:

“President Trump has said countless times that they are only coming after him because he stands in their way from coming after you—and Hillary Clinton just confirmed that to be true. Tens of millions of Americans will reject the Democrat Party’s re-education camp agenda in November 2024 when we make Donald Trump the 47th president of the United States.”