5 Events That Prove This Was Hillary’s Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
Hillary Clinton just had a terrible, no good, very bad week. A series of events have started to catch up with her and have resulted in Donald Trump closing the polling gap nationally and state by state. Here are five reasons why this is so:
1. Trump looked presidential in a foreign visit
Clinton’s main selling point is that Trump is an unhinged individual that will embarrass himself and the nation when dealing with foreign leaders. That was forcefully put to bed on Wednesday when Trump flew to Mexico for a meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto. Following the meeting, the two held a joint press conference which had Trump looking and acting presidential. Sure there has been some quibbling over whether or not the two discussed payment for a wall across the US-Mexico border. But the underlying optics were of a cool controlled Trump, who sounded measured.
2. Press is getting irritable about press conferences
Today marks 273 days since Clinton has held a press conference. After this week Trump has held more press conferences in foreign countries than Clinton has held on American soil. The press is starting to take notice. Politico cataloged press reaction after Tim Kaine told CBS news that Clinton is very available to the media:
Co-anchor Norah O’Donnell, off-screen, asked, “Really?”
“That’s not true – no matter how you count her availabilities,” CNN reporter Dan Merica tweeted, cc’ing traveling press secretary Nick Merrill.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller retweeted the message.
“I bet the reporters who follow Clinton ‘everywhere she goes’ would beg to differ with Tim Kaine’s assertion here,” The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker wrote, to which Bloomberg Politics’ Jennifer Epstein responded, “We do.”
To borrow a phrase from CR’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin, Clinton’s “praetorian guard” is getting antsy at carrying her water. And they have started being very vocal about it.
3. Emails won’t go away.
This week we also learned that the State Department has uncovered 30 more emails regarding the Benghazi consulate from Hillary Clinton’s private email account. This calls into question whether Clinton was truthful when she said all work emails were turned over before using BleachBit to clean her servers. It is not just the Benghazi emails that are resurfacing, but details about the whole operation.
The Daily Caller reported that Clinton’s top aides at the State Department, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, were very weary of her use of a private email.
One aide worried that Clinton was giving her private email address “to everyone,” but the other aide assured her that Clinton was not widely distributing her address, but that she was receiving forwarded email from her prior Senate email address.
“Personally, I think it’s outrageous that staff go straight to her on this stuff,” Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin told Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills in an April 3, 2009, email exchange.
“This is unbelievable, and she also should not be giving her email to everyone – b/c she will get stuff like this,” a frustrated Mills replied.
The emails will continue to dog Clinton, and it will not be just from Wikileaks. A judge has ruled that a whole host of other emails must be released. As the public learns more, Clinton’s poll numbers continue to drop.
Late yesterday, the FBI released the report they sent to the Justice Department regarding Hillary’s use of a private email server. As Leon Wolf of Redstate noted on Twitter, “From the FBI’s notes they just released: 68 of the email chains they found on Clinton’s private server are still classified today.”
4. Increasing calls for the end of the Clinton Foundation
After Associated Press investigation alleging pay-for-play between the Clinton Foundation donor base and the State Department under Clinton, media publications have started to call for the Clinton Foundation to wind down fundraising operations. In an editorial, the New York Times called on the Clinton Foundation to stop taking donations immediately, saying:
The Clinton Foundation has become a symbol of the Clintons’ laudable ambitions, but also of their tangled alliances and operational opacity. If Mrs. Clinton wins, it could prove a target for her political adversaries. Achieving true distance from the foundation is not only necessary to ensure its effectiveness, it is an ethical imperative for Mrs. Clinton.
The Hill reported that experts have called into question the Foundation’s promise to end taking donations with a Clinton win.
Watchdog groups are poking holes into former President Bill Clinton’s promise that his family’s foundation will stop taking foreign and corporate cash if his wife wins the presidency.
They say it would be relatively easy for foreign governments or individuals to funnel cash into the foundation during a Hillary Clinton presidency without the American public ever learning of the foreign contributions — despite the former president’s promises outlined in an Aug. 22 open letter published on the Clinton Foundation’s website.
Rather than tamping down talk of the Foundation, the media are seemingly digging further into it. It will be interesting to see if the media back down on the Clinton criticism if she decides to hold press conferences, as this may just be a tool they are using to force her hand.
5. Favorability ratings nosedive
Clinton’s already high negatives have begun a free fall, as the public learns more about her shady dealings and probable corruption at the State Department. This week polling began to show her unfavorable rating ratcheting up from a percentage in the low 50s to a percentage pushing 60 percent. This has coincided with Trump’s unfavorable rating coming down from the mid-60s to the upper 50s.
The shift is also being shown in the polling as Trump has begun closing the post-DNC gap Clinton reached earlier this summer.
All in all this has been a brutal week for Hillary Clinton. Trump has once again seized the momentum, and is driving the message. With their first joint appearance on Wednesday evening, we will see if this momentum can hold. (For more from the author of “5 Events That Prove This Was Hillary’s Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Week” please click HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
