Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she tried everything to dodge President Trump’s inauguration in January.
“I really tried to get out of going,” she said on Friday’s broadcast of “The Graham Norton Show.”
Clinton explained that she had been invited not as a candidate but as a former First Lady because, traditionally, former living Presidents and First Ladies attend presidential inaugurations “to show support, continuity of our government,” Clinton said.
Clinton said she thought that if other former Presidents and their spouses planned on boycotting the event, that it might be okay for Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to do the same.
“So we called the Bushes, and the elder Bushes were in the hospital, which I think was legitimate,” Clinton said.
“Then we called the younger Bushes and they said, ‘yeah, we’re going,’ we called the Carters, and they said, ‘yeah, we’re going.’ So Bill and I looked at each other and said ‘well we got to go.'”
Clinton said she was hopeful that Trump would “rise to the occasion of being our President and being the President for everybody, not just people who supported him.
Instead, she left the inauguration “so disappointed” after listening to Trump deliver a “really dark, divisive speech that I described as a cry from the white nationalist gut,” Clinton said, referring to a passage in her new memoir, “What Happened.”
“I was so disappointed that it wasn’t an outreach. It was a narrowing and hammering of what he had said before,” Clinton said.
She also repeated reports that former President George W. Bush called Trump’s inauguration speech “some weird s–t.”
