Hillary Clinton wants to make something very clear about her and Donald Trump: “We were not friends.”
“We knew each other, obviously, in New York,” she told People magazine in an interview released on Wednesday. “I knew a lot of people.”
With daughter Chelsea by her side, the former secretary of state dismissed Trump’s recent comments about her husband’s infidelity. Trump has said that former President Bill Clinton is “one of the great abusers” of women.
Clinton shrugged off Trump’s comments as “politics,” though not “the brand I approve of.”
Despite what Clinton and Trump say now, their relationship has seen better days.
In a 2012 interview with Fox, he called Clinton a “terrific woman.”
“I really like her and her husband both a lot. I think she really works hard,” Trump had said.
And the Clintons attended the real estate mogul’s 2005 wedding, though Trump has subsequently dismissed the invitation as a business gesture.
“When I needed Hillary, she was there,” he said in July. “If I say, ‘go to my wedding,’ they go to my wedding.”
Chelsea Clinton said the recent back-and-forth — which was set off in earnest when her mother told the Des Moines Register in December that Trump “demonstrated a penchant for sexism” — has not affected her friendship with Ivanka Trump, Donald’s eldest daughter.
“I’ve never had a relationship with Mr. Trump. My relationship has always been with Ivanka,” Chelsea Clinton said. “And I would never hold anyone accountable for what anyone else in their family said.”