Hillary on a Trump rematch: "Obviously, I can beat him again"

“Again”? Forget it, she’s rolling. Or trolling. Take your pick, but Hillary Clinton isn’t going to get a rematch now even if she wanted it. And especially since Donald Trump wants it:

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday trolled President Trump after he suggested that she should run for president again, joking that “maybe there does need to be a rematch.”

“Obviously I can beat him again,” Clinton joked on “PBS NewsHour” in an apparent reference to her earning a majority of the popular vote in the 2016 election. Trump won the Electoral College vote, 304-227.

The comments from Clinton, who has launched two White House bids, came as Trump continued to lash out at Democrats over a formal impeachment inquiry launched in the House. He targeted Clinton in an early-morning tweet Tuesday, saying that he thought she “should enter the race to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren.”

“Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her high crimes and misdemeanors,” Trump said, prompting Clinton to reply, “don’t tempt me. Do your job.”

The “again” comment is Hillary Clinton’s attempt at being cute about her loss in 2016. Since that shocking defeat, Hillary has offered any number of excuses for her poor performance in traditionally blue states, almost all of which focus on something other than Hillary Clinton herself: sexism, Russia, disinformation, James Comey, the heretofore-unknown existence of Wisconsin as a state, etc. That act is wearing thin, but that was true of The Clinton Act as a whole before 2016 too.

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Her appearance on PBS’ NewsHour is ostensibly in support of her new book Gutsy Women, co-authored by daughter Chelsea. It does have the aroma of a pre-campaign, however, similar to the epic flop of a tour Hillary conducted in 2014 in support of her campaign-ready memoir Hard Choices, for which she received a stunning $14 million advance. This one seems to be going better, as Hillary has managed to avoid dropping bon mots such as $100 million not making one “truly well off,” and lamenting the poverty into which she and Bill fell after his term ended in January 2001.

Hillary certainly sounds as if she’s on the campaign trail more than the book-flacking tour:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday slammed President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, saying the move was a “betrayal” of Kurdish allies and would lead to a “resurgence of militancy” in the region. …

Clinton said Trump’s latest Syria plan was playing into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands, and represented another example of Trump allowing foreign leaders to influence U.S. foreign policy. Trump also announced an immediate withdrawal of thousands of troops from Syria last year after speaking to Erdogan, though he later said the drawdown would take place more slowly.

“Why are we sitting silently by and watching him do Putin’s bidding?” Clinton said, adding, “there’s no happier man in the world right now than Putin.”

Clinton, who served as the U.S.’s top diplomat for four years, said Trump’s foreign policy decisions damage the U.S.’s standing overseas.

The next president “will inherit shattered alliances, emboldened adversaries” and “all kinds of internal divisions that are going to have to be addressed,” she said.

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And, er … gutsy women, or something! Hillary sounds more like a gusty woman on this tour, one who resents having to talk about these (ahem) hard choices than being the one making them. That doesn’t mean, however, that she and Trump are going to get their rematch. Democrats have too many other candidates clogging the path to yet another coronation attempt, candidates without Clinton’s baggage and track record of failure against Trump. Unlike in 2016, Clinton didn’t lock up all of the major institutional donors and no longer has a campaign staff on salary at her charitable foundation. Even with all of those advantages, she needed the DNC to cook the process to hold off a crank socialist from Vermont in the last cycle’s Democratic primaries.

Hillary knows all this, even if she might secretly yearn for a rematch. The best she can do is a book tour and gust on from the sidelines.

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