CHICAGO — Former President Bill Clinton ridiculed Republican nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday night, calling him a narcissist consumed by petty concerns that have nothing to do with Americans’ everyday problems.
Speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton contrasted what he described as Trump’s fixation with crowd sizes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ focus on improving lives.
“In 2024, we’ve got a pretty clear choice, it seems to me,” Clinton told a packed crowd at the United Center.
Harris is “for the people,” he said. “The other guy is about me, myself and I.”
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If Harris wins in November, she will become the first female president, shattering what Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” when she lost to Trump eight years ago.
As he addressed the crowd in prime time, Hillary Clinton watched and applauded from the audience, standing between the couple’s daughter, Chelsea, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Bill Clinton’s speech offered a flurry of self-deprecation. Nodding to his love of fast food, he mentioned that Harris worked at McDonald’s when she was a student.
“I’ll be so happy when she actually enters the White House as president because she will break my record as the president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s,” he said.
Clinton has spoken at every Democratic nominating convention since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was the party’s nominee. Never one for brevity, he holds perhaps the dubious record of having delivered the longest Democratic acceptance speech in the modern era. His address in 1996 clocked in at nearly 65 minutes.
This one was less than half as long, with something of a nostalgic feel. “I want to say this from the bottom of my heart,” said Clinton, who at 78 is two months younger than Trump. “I have no idea how many more of these I’ll be able to come to.”
Famous for tinkering with his speeches right up until delivery, Clinton tore up his draft Monday — the first day of the convention — and began reworking the speech from scratch, a person familiar with the speech preparations said.
Mindful of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s dictum, “campaign in poetry, govern in prose,” Clinton then worked to inject the speech with a folksier quality that also captured the enthusiasm that Harris’ candidacy has awakened, the person said.
But he also skewered Trump, to the delight of a partisan audience desperate to win this fall. Former President Barack Obama once dubbed Clinton the “secretary of explaining stuff.”
Yet Clinton conceded that even he’s at a loss to explain Trump’s constant campaign references to Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal from the 1991 horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
After Clinton’s speech, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung attacked him in a statement.
“Bill Clinton is a total loser who is desperately clinging onto whatever spotlight he can get because nobody cares what he has to say,” Cheung said. “The sad reality is that he, along with Crooked Hillary, suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and has let it rot his brain to the point that he is a shell of a shell of a person he once was.”
Since he won the presidency in 1992, Clinton has had an up-and-down relationship with the American public. He beat back an impeachment attempt that congressional Republicans launched in 1998 over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Voters proved forgiving. When he left office three years later, 56% of Americans held positive views of him, compared to just 33% with negative views, according to NBC News polling.
But just two months later, Clinton’s positive rating had dropped 22 points amid the fallout over a series of questionable pardons he’d granted on his last day in office.
He worked to elect his wife in both her 2008 and 2016 presidential bids, only to see her fall short both times.
Now he is poised to campaign in battleground states for Harris.
He may be positioned to vouch for Harris with older voters who credit him with presiding over a robust economy in the 1990s.
“If you vote for this team, if you get them elected and let them bring in this breath of fresh air, you’ll be proud of it for the rest of your life,” Clinton said. “Your children will be proud of it. Your grandchildren will be proud of it.”
“I’ll be doing my part,” he added. “You do yours.”
