Hillary Clinton sat down with Graham Norton this week, in an interview that was uncharacteristically laid back and candid for the Democratic 2016 presidential candidate. After having lost the election, you may recall (although it seems like so, so long ago now) that Clinton still attended the inauguration of Donald Trump with her head held high. As she revealed to Norton however, that was unsurprisingly not an easy thing for her to do, and she very badly wanted to get out of it.
As it turns out, her presence at Inauguration Day had nothing to do with being a good sport, but that it was tradition for former presidents and their wives to come out and show support for the incoming administration. Given the circumstances surrounding this highly unusual presidency, Clinton speculated that maybe others wouldn’t show up. “We called the Bushes, and the other Bushes were in the hospital — which, I think was legitimate,” she joked. “And so then, we called the younger Bushes and they said ‘Yeah, we’re going,’ and we called the Carters, and they said ‘Yeah we’re going,’ so Bill and I looked at each other and we said, ‘We gotta go.'”
The former first lady said that she hoped that Trump would defy his campaign expectations with his inauguration speech and actually rise to the occasion of being president, but of course, we all know how that turned out. While she was on the subject though, Mrs. Clinton more or less confirmed George W. Bush’s widely reported reaction to Trump’s speech, and yeah — that’s one way of putting it.
While she was there, Clinton also talked about — what else — Trump’s penchant for inappropriate tweeting, whether it be attacking his opponents or trying to sum up complicated issues in 140 characters. She said the most dangerous thing Trump uses Twitter for however is conducting diplomacy. “He is trading insults with Kim Jong-Un, which is just catnip for Kim Jong-Un,” she said. “He loves that, the idea that he’s in a Twitter insult-fest with the President of the United States? So he does things are are truly — not only upsetting, but kind of inexplicable.”