Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton used her new memoir to draw parallels between US President Donald Trump’s “war on truth” and the Soviet Union and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” the defeated presidential candidate wrote in What Happened, published yesterday.
“This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered,” Clinton wrote.
Photo: AFP
The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust, Clinton wrote.
“For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s about simple dominance,” she wrote.
She said that Trump has taken “the war on truth” to a whole new level.
“If he stood up tomorrow and declared that the Earth is flat, his counselor Kellyanne Conway might just go on Fox News and defend it as an ‘alternative fact,’ and too many people would believe it,” Clinton wrote.
The 469-page memoir tries to come to grips with Clinton’s personally and politically catastrophic defeat in November last year.
She identifies many reasons, including racism, sexism, the late intervention of the FBI and her own mistakes.
“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment,” she wrote. “I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country’s problems. He was ranting on Twitter.”
Clinton peppers the book with insults aimed at Trump.
These include: “A clear and present danger to the country and the world”; “He’d remade himself from tabloid scoundrel into right-wing crank”; “For Trump, if everyone’s down in the mud with him, then he’s no dirtier than anyone else”; “He had no ideological core apart from his towering self-regard, which blotted out all hope of learning or growing.”
Clinton also showed little affection for her rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, identifying him as another causal factor in her defeat.
“His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘crooked Hillary’ campaign,” she wrote. “I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.”
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