Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has denigrated Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), her primary rival in 2016, and declined to endorse him in the 2020 race.
Clinton, who lost in 2016 to Donald Trump, said in the upcoming Hulu docuseries “Hillary” that Sanders struggles to get support.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Clinton said.
The Sanders campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Clinton told The Hollywood Reporter that her assessment still holds and declined to say whether she’d support Sanders, even if he got the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture—not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it,” Clinton said.
Sanders this week urged supporters to “engage in civil discourse” and not “demonize people who may disagree with us.”
Clinton and Sanders had a contentious 2016 clash while vying for the presidential nomination. Emails published by WikiLeaks showed Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials disparaging Sanders and pushing for Clinton’s nomination. Several officials resigned after the emails were published. Sanders campaigned with Clinton after she won the nomination.
Sanders has denied telling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that a woman couldn’t win the presidency, noting he said decades ago that a woman should be president. But Clinton was still asked about the alleged comments, and pointed back to what happened when she was running.
“If it were a one-off, you might say, ‘OK, fine.’ But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me,” Clinton told The Hollywood Reporter.
“I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration.”
“Clinton” will debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 25. It won’t hit Hulu until March 6, after some two dozen states vote in the primaries. The company is billing it as “a remarkably intimate portrait of a public woman” that “interweaves revealing moments from never-before-seen 2016 campaign footage with biographical chapters of her life.”
