Hillary Clinton used an audience at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual convention to lash out at the Trump administration Thursday, saying Democrats must combat a “revolution to turn the clock back,” a revolution that she said is eroding the building blocks of civil and voting rights established decades ago.
Clinton, a former secretary of state who lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, also contended the Republican president in his current, second term has displayed “incoherence” and “unintelligent” foreign policy concepts, including launching a war in Iran that was “unmoored from reality.”
Clinton, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Park Ridge and served as first lady and as a U.S. senator, appeared at Rainbow PUSH’s South Side headquarters. It was the first PUSH convention and her first visit since the February death and March funeral of the organization’s founder, civil rights leader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Speaking to Jackson’s son, Yusef, who took over as CEO of the organization in April, Clinton lauded the family’s close relationship dating to former President Bill Clinton’s days as Arkansas governor and said, “I don’t think in the 1970s and the ’80s or ’90s either your dad or certainly Bill and I thought we would be facing a concerted effort to turn the clock back.”
“We have to reconstitute movements that moved us forward, that made it possible to claim we were trying to get to that more perfect union,” she said. “They were not led by political elected officials. They were led by clergy, they were led by business leaders, they were led by civic organizers, they were led by young people. So we don’t need to have a bunch of elected officials leading this new movement. We need to have it be from the bottom up, the grassroots, coming back to get organized and move forward again.”
Clinton attacked Trump for “the damage that he has done to our institutions, to the rule of law, to our sense of unity as a nation, to our belief that e pluribus unum, out of many, one.”
“He doesn’t believe any of that and so part of what we’ve got to do is elect leaders who have the heart of a servant leader, who are understanding that they have to serve the people, and that by serving the people, they will help all of us find a way forward that is going to benefit the country,” she said.
But Clinton also said Democrats “probably took too much for granted” in believing their gains on civil and societal rights had been solidified despite a constant threat from “leaders who actually catered to the worst of our nature, not the best.”
“I’m not naive. I know that there are lots of interest groups who don’t want us to make progress, who don’t care about how many of our fellow citizens are suffering right now,” she said. “That’s why we have to beat them in elections with people who do care, and then those people who do care have to come together and develop smart strategies to actually make a difference.”
Clinton said Trump has made a “mess” of U.S. foreign policy and said past presidents knew that engaging Iran in war would lead to that country’s closing of the Straight of Hormuz and the resulting increase in supply chain costs to Americans.
“The idea that you could bully Iran, a theocracy that believes in its religious vision of what the Islamic Republic is supposed to be, is just unmoored from history,” she said. “This is not a society that’s going to be intimidated by Donald Trump.”
“We’ve done a lot of damage to ourselves,” she added. “We have undermined the trust that our allies need to have in us. We have given a lot of comfort to our adversaries because they see us flailing around. We have just launched a war that we’re losing. And it is so incredibly sad to me that this effort by the current president against Iran is unmoored from reality.”
Following Clinton’s discussion with Jackson, Gov. JB Pritzker closed out the second day of the conference with a roughly 15-minute address that was part tribute to the Rev. Jackson and part campaign stump speech, peppered with familiar criticisms of Trump and Republicans in Washington.
“I’m grateful to everyone here who has chosen hope over fear, even in these most challenging days for our republic,” Pritzker said. “It feels like reading the news these days is — well, it takes an act of courage. The White House and Congress have fallen into the hands of grifters of false pride, of purveyors of bigotry and hatred, spelunkers for misery, and their aim is to enrich and aggrandize themselves, and to do it at the expense of the powerless and the most vulnerable.”
Tracing a line connecting federal cuts to the social safety net with Republican-led efforts to roll back protections for voting rights and minority representation, Pritzker said, “Blood has been shed, lives have been lost to secure the right to vote for representatives who share our lived experience, and we are now witnessing the culmination of a decades-long plot to dismantle that right, to disenfranchise Black voters and constrain Black power.”
Pritzker also touted that Illinois has a chance in November “to become the first state ever to send our, not first, but second black woman to the United States Senate, Juliana Stratton,” his two-term lieutenant governor, whose Democratic primary campaign he supported with $10 million directed through an outside super political action committee.
