Hillary Clinton Criticizes Trump and Putin During Portrait Unveiling

Hillary Clinton, at an event honoring her service as the 67th secretary of state and during which a new portrait of her was unveiled, took direct aim at Russian President Vladimir Putin and made barbed, more veiled comments about former President Donald Trump, who defeated her in the 2016 election. 

Clinton, accompanied at the event at the State Department Tuesday by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, praised current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying that damages done while Trump was in office would have made it unthinkable for the United States and its allies to support Ukraine, reported ABC News.

She didn’t mention Trump by name, but commented that “we had burned so many bridges with our allies and our friends, so reinstating a foreign policy that plays to the best of American values, that puts our interests and security front and center but does it in a way that actually brings people to us, not pushes them away — would have been thought to be extremely difficult, and indeed it was.”

Clinton also commented, before the curtain dropped from her portrait, that it had been a long time since she had seen the painting, “between Covid, between not wanting to finish it during the last administration.”

She also thanked the State Department, noting that when she was in office, “We continued to build on our human rights commitments, women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of all people to have a chance to live up to their own God-given potential,” and that those priorities were continued in the Biden administration.

Regarding Putin, Clinton remarked that it was “too bad, Vladimir. You brought it on yourself” in reference to his invasion of Ukraine, a war that has reached a stalemate and resulted in the expansion of NATO.