Hillary Clinton has a fresh target as she steps up her attacks on Donald Trump: the media.
Clinton tweaked the media’s coverage of Trump at her fundraiser in San Francisco on Friday night, according to multiple attendees. Clinton, the donors said, told the group that she wished “he would be asked the follow-up questions” about his plans and proposals, arguing that he gets away with empty plans and promises. Clinton also told the group that she has been asked “millions of questions over the years.”
The donors said the comments played well in the 200-person room at The Masonic in downtown San Francisco.
Clinton has been a more subtle media critic for much of the 2016 campaign, suggesting that she is subject to more scrutiny than anyone else and saying that her political press corps is only interested in headlines.
Yet Clinton has also subjected the media to treatment unlike most presidential campaigns: Her campaign used a moving ropeline to keep the press at bay in 2015 and once went 88 days without taking questions from reporters who travel with her.
Clinton is increasingly criticizing the media in her stump speeches. The candidate made the same case at an open event in Oakland earlier on Friday.
“Donald Trump says he is going to repeal it,” Clinton said of Obamacare. “Somebody should ask, ‘What are you going to replace it with?’ and if the answer is, ‘Something great,’ there should be at least a follow-up question, don’t you think? Because frankly, they can’t tell you what they will replace it with because you wouldn’t like what you hear.”
Clinton also told MSNBC in an interview Tuesday that Trump “has given no indication that he understands the gravity of the responsibilities that go with being commander-in-chief” and that, at some point, he is “going to have to be held to the standard we hold anybody running for president and commander-in-chief.”
The critique is similar to what President Barack Obama has said he thinks about the 2016 race.
“He has a long record that needs to be examined,” Obama said at a news conference at the White House Friday. “I think it’s important for us to take seriously the statements he’s made in the past.”
Obama also took a poke at the media for its coverage of Trump while speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last week.
“I don’t want to spend too much time on The Donald. Following your lead, I want to show some restraint,” Obama said, to laughter. “Because I think we can all agree that from the start, he’s gotten the appropriate amount of coverage, befitting the seriousness of his candidacy.”
Clinton has been upping her critique of Trump since he all but locked up the nomination on Tuesday, using almost all of her stump speech to contrast herself with the businessman.
Clinton on Friday called Trump the Republicans’ “presumptuous nominee” and said “he doesn’t think much of equal pay for women because of course he doesn’t think much of women, it turns out.”
Trump, likewise, has started to use former President Bill Clinton’s sexual impropriety against the 2016 candidate.
Trump on Friday accused Hillary Clinton of being “an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler” of her husband’s alleged affairs and accused her of destroying the lives of his accusers.
“She’s been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives,” Trump said, adding, “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.”