Hillary Clinton is taking no prisoners.
In her commencement speech at Wellesley College Friday, she spoke at length, not just about her hopes and dreams for the graduates of her alma mater, but about President Trump, whom she criticized harshly and likened to former president Richard Nixon.
She drew parallels between her student commencement speech in 1969 and the speech she gave Friday.
“We were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace for impeachment of obstruction of justice,” she said, “after firing the person running the investigation into him at the Department of Justice.”
In 1973, President Nixon dismissed Archibald Cox, who had acted as an independent special prosecutor to investigate the events surrounding the Watergate scandal. This month, President Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was in the midst of an investigation into the Trump White House’s ties to Russia and that country’s possible interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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She also echoed a sentiment she expressed earlier this week at a Children’s Health Fund event in New York City about Trump’s recent budget proposal, calling it “an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us.”
The budget calls for slashing more than $610 billion from the Medicaid budget, cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (which provides food stamps) by $190 billion and cuts to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants by $15.6 billion.
In addition to being “cruel,” the budget is a “con,” the former secretary of state said. “It’s a trillion-dollar mathematical lie.”
Clinton also cautioned graduates against accepting untruths.
“When people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society,” Clinton said, “That is not hyperbole, it is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done.”
