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Hillary Clinton: 'What is
more uncivil than taking children away?'
She has made peace with
losing the election – but not with Donald Trump. Now she is
fighting to undo the damage of the president’s child-separation
policy – and has no time for debates over civility
(By Decca Aitkenhead)
When Hillary Clinton made
her first public appearance after losing the 2016 election, it was
her admission that she had felt like “never leaving the house
again” that made headlines.
Twenty months later, other
details of the speech seem much more significant.
That Clinton had
left her house to address the Children’s Defense Fund, a child
advocacy organisation, said a lot about where the defeated candidate
saw her future.
Her warning about “the little girl I met in Nevada
who started to cry when she told me how scared she was that her
parents would be taken away from her and be deported”, told us more
about her country’s future than we knew.
But when I quote her words
back to her, it’s not the accuracy of her prescience that makes her
shudder, but its inadequacy.
“I was hopeful that I
wouldn’t see the worst of my fears come true.
But it has been
worse.
I have to tell you, even I did not believe this would happen.”
… Looking more like her
old secretary of state self than the glossy, coiffured version we saw
on the campaign trail, she launches straight into the politics of
Donald Trump’s already notorious family-separation policy.
Clinton has no doubt that
Trump deployed the policy for the strategic purpose of making his
wall look like a more palatable option.
“He is playing to his base
– and his base was attracted to him for a number of reasons, one of
which was his anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that was exemplified by
the wall. So the wall became more of a symbol than a real plan.
He
has now decided that he has to do whatever he can to get the wall, to
satisfy the base. And I think,” she adds, “he has gone so far in
that direction that he does things which are truly unimaginably cruel
and unrelated to the outcome.”
What does she mean by
that? “I mean, you do not have to take children away from their
parents to negotiate to get what you want on the wall.
There are
enough different strands in the immigration debate that he could give
a little somewhere and try to get [something] in return, like you do
in a democracy, in a political legislative process.
But he has chosen
instead to be very oppositional to anyone who criticises him, to be
very intimidating to everyone in his own party by threatening to
unleash his base against them.
And so he has adopted these
all-or-nothing positions.”
Trump called it off,
Clinton believes, only because “even for him, the optics were
terrible”, but she says that his executive order ending the policy
has not even begun to solve the problem.
“The question of how we
reunite the children who were taken from the parents is the one
that’s keeping me up at night.”
Does she worry some may never be
reunited? She looks stricken. “Yes, I do. Absolutely I worry about
that. I’m worried that some children will not be reunited.
Clinton’s expression
grows increasingly bleak as she catalogues the bureaucratic chaos.
For a start, many of the children are nonverbal; others don’t speak
Spanish, but obscure Mayan languages. And all are confused and
traumatised.
Having been “funnelled through a whole panoply” of
Homeland Security agencies notorious for “very poor record keeping
and incompetence”, many of which are privately run, some babies
have been transported all the way from the border to Detroit and New
York. Others have gone to foster care families; some parents have
already been deported without their children.
“You just could not
even imagine a worse child-welfare tragedy.”
She tells me she has
raised $1.5m in the days before we meet, to “flood the border with
lawyers, interpreters, experienced social workers, psychologists. We
just have to get as much expertise down there to force the federal
government to give us everything.”
It’s the kind of
resource-focused, pragmatic response we would expect from someone
with a reputation for technocratic efficiency, so I’m a bit taken
aback to see tears fill her eyes.
When the MSNBC anchor Rachel
Maddow broke down and wept on air while reporting plans to build
“tender age” detention facilities for infants, “didn’t that
make you cry?” Clinton challenges me. “Well, I felt exactly the
same way.” Dabbing her eyes, she lets rip.
“I mean, you just …
who thinks like that? Who does these things? How
can anybody look in the mirror? How can they actually live with
themselves?
If you heard about it in some third-world banana
republic, you’d say: ‘That’s horrible! Stop it! Who would do
that?’
Now it’s happening in our country, and it’s just so
distressing.
I think a lot of us keep waiting for the bottom – and
it just seems to be bottomless.”
Throughout the
presidential campaign, Clinton was criticised for exercising a degree
of emotional self-control that looked cold and inauthentic, while
Trump’s volatility was taken as evidence that he meant what he said
and really cared.
Lately, however, Democrats have been provoked to
condemn the president with a passion some on the left warn is
becoming “uncivil”. I’m curious to know what Clinton thinks of
this.
“Oh, give me a break,”
she erupts, eyes widening into indignation. “Give me a break! What
is more uncivil and cruel than taking children away? It should be met
with resolve and strength. And if some of that comes across as a
little uncivil, well, children’s lives are at stake; their futures
are at stake. That is that ridiculous concept of bothsideism.”
She
adopts a mockingly prim voice. “‘Well, you know, somebody made an
insulting, profane remark about President Trump, and he separated
2,300 children from their families, that’s both sides, and we
should stop being uncivil – oh and, by the way, he should stop
separating children.’
Give me a break, really,” she growls,
rolling her eyes. “I mean, this is a crisis of his making that will
damage kids for no good reason at all, and I think everybody should
be focused on that until the children are reunited.”
During her day in Swansea
with academics and local politicians, she answers questions on
everything...The only questions I see floor her concern Melania
Trump.
What did Clinton make, I
ask, of her public statement about “hating” to see families
separated? “I didn’t know what to make of it.”
I ask how she
interpreted the jacket the first lady wore to visit a child detention
centre, bearing the opaque and intriguing slogan: ‘I really don’t
care, do u?’
Clinton slumps back in her chair, wide eyed, arms
spread, defeated by the mystery. “That, I have no idea. I have no
idea. I can’t even … I don’t have any idea. I don’t know.”
… She assures me she has
made her peace with her defeat. “I’m OK. I’m fine.” But
having devoted her whole life to public service, she must still
wonder why her country preferred a man memorably surprised to find
the presidency “more work” than he had expected.
I wonder if
Americans who found Trump’s leisurely work ethic more relatable now
regard Clinton’s resolve to keep going as not so much heroic as
weird If she decided to call it a day, I begin to say, no one would
blame …
“I would,” she
interrupts. “I would blame me. Yes. I would.
It feels like a duty.
It feels like patriotism, and it feels necessary. I’m not going
anywhere.”
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→ Some of my favorite, most active organizations -- some existing & some developing to elect Democrats:
Born from conversations between Governor Howard Dean and Secretary Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Onward Together was established to lend support to leaders — particularly young leaders — kicking off projects and founding new organizations to fight for our shared progressive values. here
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→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of my favorite, highly credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
📰📰📰📰 The Washington Post
→ Some of my favorite Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
→ Some of my favorite media/panelists -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
✅✅✅✅ Joan Walsh national affairs correspondent for The Nation; CNN political contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @ WashingtonPost's Right Turn, MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @ TheAtlantic covering national security & the intel community. @ NBCNews/@ MSNBC contributor
→ Some of my favorite Democrats to follow on Twitter, not in elected office but proving knowledge & experience are positives & not negatives are:
President Barack Obama
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former Labor Secretary/Today's DNC Chair Tom Perez
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
( 📎 Interesting to note: Wallace, a former Republican (or an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself) is new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
📎 Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area. And, unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees winning in general elections.
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
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Thank you for Focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
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