Clinton calls Trump's slogan a "cruel fantasy"
Though Hillary Clinton denied the Brexit outcome will have a direct impact on her presidential campaign, she did see similarities between the U.K. voters who chose to leave the E.U. and those in the U.S. who are also feeling left behind by a highly technical global economy.
"A lot of people in small towns, rural, even less successful cities said, 'No, let's go back to the way we think it was.' And in effect, that's what Trump is promising," Clinton said, in an interview with LinkedIn Executive Editor, Dan Roth.
"'Make America Great Again' is really code for, 'Hey, I can turn the clock back. And I can make you feel good. And I can get you the job that you used to have and even at more money," Clinton told Roth. "And you know, we won't have to worry about these pesky immigrants and Muslims and women and African-Americans and other people, because we're going to make it great again on terms that will favor you.'"
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"[I]t's a cruel fantasy," Clinton continued. "We know that is. But we also have to have a positive agenda. It's not enough to say, 'That's nonsense, it can't be done. We've got to say, You know what? We are going to create more good jobs.'"
But the "stay" side in the Brexit debate also didn't do enough to make its case, Clinton argued. She thought that they were "not as emotionally effective" in making their case as the "leave" side.
"I do agree, though, with the analysts who are saying, 'Look, the leave campaign just told all kinds of false tales' and advertised on buses and in posters a lot of what they said would happen... So I really fault the ["remain"] campaign for not taking on all of those wrong, misleading claims," Clinton told Roth, before going on to compare that campaign to her own.
"...Now we're not sitting around letting Donald Trump say whatever he wants to say, we are responding to what he does say," she said. "We are pointing out his intemperate and unqualified presence for being our commander-in-chief."