After losing to Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton has been desperately trying to remain relevant. Even in a time when questioning the results of an election makes you an enemy of democracy, she continues to beat the "Trump Stole the Election" drum for any audience willing to hear it and believe it. Worse yet, she is eternally obsessed with Trump — so much so that I think she needs psychological help.
I don't doubt that the 2016 election broke her and likely caused her some psychological damage. How could it not have? She was lulled into a false sense of confidence, and she saw her victory as inevitable. Media pundits had put her odds of winning at close to 100%, and then she lost.
What kind of psychological damage does that cause?
Is she in therapy? I wouldn't be surprised if she is, but if so, it's not going well. We can see this clearly in the op-ed she wrote for the New York Times on Tuesday, where she proves once again that she can't let go of the 2016 election. In her piece, she proclaims that it would be a "waste of time" to attempt to debunk Trump's claims in his upcoming debate with Joe Biden.
“It is a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump’s arguments like in a normal debate,” she writes. “It’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather. This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated.”
Hillary also tapped into the narrative that the bar is so low for Trump that he'll inevitably win the debate. According to her, "expectations for him are so low that if he doesn’t literally light himself on fire on Thursday evening, some will say he was downright presidential.”
Mr. Trump may rant and rave in part because he wants to avoid giving straight answers about his unpopular positions, like restrictions on abortion, giving tax breaks to billionaires and selling out our planet to big oil companies in return for campaign donations. He interrupts and bullies — even stalking me around the stage at one point — because he wants to appear dominant and throw his opponent off balance.
These ploys will fall flat if President Biden is as direct and forceful as he was when engaging Republican hecklers at the State of the Union address in March. The president also has facts and truth on his side. He led America’s comeback from a historic health and economic crisis, with more than 15 million jobs created so far, incomes for working families rising, inflation slowing and investments in clean energy and advanced manufacturing soaring. He’ll win if that story comes through.
And then she attempts to set expectations even lower for Biden. "Unfortunately, Mr. Biden starts from a disadvantage because there’s no way he can spend as much time preparing as I did eight years ago," she claimed. "Being president isn’t just a day job; it’s an everything-everywhere-all-at-once job. Historically, that has led to weaker first debate performances for the incumbent."
This would be the first time anyone has ever argued that being the incumbent is a disadvantage in a presidential debate. Yet here we are. Worse yet, Biden is literally taking the week off for debate prep. She makes no mention of that for obvious reasons. Her goal here is to set the stage for Biden to rise out of the ashes of his faltering campaign like a newborn Phoenix during Thursday's debate. You can bet that media outlets have pre-written all the editorials praising Biden as the victor of the debate.
But Hillary's intense focus on Trump is what really sticks out. It's been nearly eight years since she lost in the biggest upset election in history, and she still can't stop obsessing about the man who defeated her. This isn't healthy.
