‘The View’: Hillary Clinton Explains Why Kamala Harris Did Better Than Her Debating Donald Trump

Amanda Bell September 19, 2024, 11:48 am

Joy Behar and Hillary Clinton on The View September 19 — ABC

The stars of The View had a very special guest on tap Thursday (September 19) to help them wade through the day’s “Hot Topics”: former first lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Naturally, as the former presidential candidate for the Democratic ticket in 2016, Clinton was asked to weigh in on her successor to that task, Vice President Kamala Harris — particularly, about her performance at her first (and, for now, only) debate against Donald Trump.

When asked by the cohosts to reflect upon how her advice to Harris worked out — “you told her to bait him because he can’t be baited, because he can be rattled, and boy were you right,” Sunny Hostin gushed — Clinton had a lot of opinions to share.

First, she clarified that Harris has an advantage in that more is known about Trump now than when she first faced him: “”Eight years ago, I had to figure out how to do a lot of things nobody had ever had to do before, and I was incredibly privileged to do that, but it was hard. It was really hard. And also, the person I was running against, people didn’t know very much about him. They’d seen him on TV playing a businessman. Yeah, they didn’t know about the six bankruptcies, they didn’t know about all the failures and his character and all the rest of it. So now he has a record,” Clinton said to contextualize the two candidacies.

“ack in 2016 in my acceptance speech at the convention, I said, ‘You can’t trust somebody with nuclear weapons who you can bait with a tweet.’ He’s definitely baitable because he has a very fragile ego. He has to be constantly buttressed. And people have to tell him how great he is, and he has to tell himself how great is, and he has to have people around him who are constantly just giving him all of this emotional support,” Clinton explained. “And so part of what she did so well was — I was baiting him about nuclear weapons, which I think is kind of important. She baited him about his crowd size.”

'The View' Hosts React to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

“So we learned a lot about how to expose him,” Clinton continued. “He doesn’t care about nuclear weapons. He doesn’t care about his policy, but his crowd size… So I think that she understood and did it so effectively. Because it wasn’t about just scoring points against him in a debate. It’s about exposing him, letting the American people see what those of you who have been around him and all of the people who worked for him now saying, ‘Please don’t let him near the White House again.’ This is not me saying it, not even you saying it. People who is were in the White House who saw him in action, who heard the crazy things he said, who stopped him from doing even worse things, so I think she got it out.”

Watch Clinton’s full comments below.

.@HillaryClinton to #TheView last week’s presidential debate: “I was baiting [Trump] about nuclear weapons [in 2016], which I think is kind of important. [Vice Pres. Harris] baited him about his crowd size — so we learned a lot about how to expose him.” pic.twitter.com/ljmRnLO61K

— The View (@TheView) September 19, 2024