(LifeSiteNews) — Hillary Clinton has said that “MAGA extremists” who support Donald Trump need “formal deprogramming” to escape from their “cult.”
In a recent interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Clinton railed against supporters of former President Trump, pathologizing them while claiming that they are part of a “cult.”
Clinton said that “many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.”
“And when do they break with him?” she asked. “Because at some point … maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.”
Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, said that she thinks Trump “sadly … will be the nominee” for the Republican Party in the 2024 presidential election.
“And we have to defeat him, and we have to defeat those who are the election deniers, as we did in 2020 and 2022. And we have to, you know, just be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican Party,” Clinton continued.
Clinton said the MAGA movement is “a classic tale of an authoritarian populist who really has a grip on the emotional, psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population and the base of the Republican Party for whatever combination of reasons.
“And it is emotional and psychological [to] see in him someone who speaks for them, and they are determined that they will continue to vote for him, attend his rallies, wear his merchandise, because for whatever reason, he and his, you know, very negative, nasty form of politics resonates with them.
“Maybe they don’t like migrants,” Clinton said in a further attempt to pathologize Trump voters and attribute malicious motives to them, adding that “maybe they don’t like gay people or black people or the woman who got the promotion at work.”
Clinton went on to disparage Trump supporters for wanting to be “in charge of their lives” and have freedom of speech, and claimed that they want to insult everyone who disagrees with them.
“Make America Great Again was a bid for nostalgia,” she said. “To return to a place where, you know, people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want, insult whoever came in their way. And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base.”
“So it is like a cult, and somebody has to break that momentum,” she concluded.
Conservative commentators roundly condemned Clinton’s comments on Trump supporters and her call for “deprogramming” MAGA Republicans on social media app X (formerly Twitter), where pundits and politicians compared her rant to a call for “re-education camps.”
Later in the interview, the former presidential candidate said that she is confident Joe Biden will be able to defeat Trump if they face off again in the forthcoming 2024 presidential election, noting that Biden has done a “fantastic job” and claimed that a re-election of Trump could “end our democracy.”
“And I don’t say that lightly,” she asserted.
Clinton saw the recent ousting of Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives as proof that the GOP is in “an absolute hostage situation with its most extreme members.”
Clinton stated that McCarthy was “punished” for “doing the right thing” because he voted alongside Democrats on a spending bill to avert a temporary government shutdown.
“He was not continuing to be captive to the far-right extremists. So they toppled him. It was a very small number as you look at the vote. But now we’re reaping the consequences of their misbehavior,” she stated.
However, Clinton contradicted her previous comments on McCarthy, stating that the caucus “could not trust” him when asked why all the Democratic representatives voted alongside the “MAGA extremists” to oust him.
“At some point, there needs to be a backlash against the control that this small group of extremists have,” she asserted, even though McCarthy’s ousting was only possible because the 208 Democrats present voted to remove him. “And I don’t know who will lead that, but let’s hope whoever becomes the new speaker will.”
