Hillary Clinton on Friday slammed Donald Trump’s reported strategy of discouraging Democratic turnout in the last weeks of the election as the “last refuge of a bankrupt candidate.”
In her speech at an early voting rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Clinton did not address FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that his agency was looking into new emails “pertinent to the investigation” of her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Instead, she condemned Trump’s “scorched-earth campaign.”
“His strategy is to get women to stay home, get young people to stay home, get people of color to stay home,” Clinton said. “It’s all part of his scorched-earth campaign, the last refuge of a bankrupt candidate, and it goes against everything we stand for in America.”
In an interview with Bloomberg Politics published Thursday, an unnamed senior official said that the Trump campaign has “three major voter suppression operations under way” to turn key demographic groups—former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), young women, and African American voters—against Clinton.
She also addressed Trump’s comments about women, calling his remarks in a leaked 2005 recording “shocking but not surprising.”
Clinton slammed Trump’s response to those women who have come forward with stories of being groped or kissed by the GOP nominee without his permission. The GOP nominee has dismissed them as “liars” and, in one case, said an accuser would not have been his “first choice.”
“This is a man who relishes making women feel terrible about themselves,” Clinton said. “And I don’t think there’s a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like.”
She went on to criticize Trump for his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the election, saying that it was “not something to be made light of.”
“There have been too many times in world history where somebody gets elected and then that’s the last election that is held,” Clinton said.
