Former President Bill Clinton said he thinks GOP candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump could be the Republican nominee.
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, which aired on Sunday, Clinton admitted that he hasn’t been in politics for a while, but he does think Trump has a chance.
“He’s got a lot of pizzaz and zip, he’s branded himself in a clear way and he’s generated some excitement,” Clinton said of Trump. “It remains to be seen what’s gonna happen.”
But he added that he doesn’t “understand any of it very well,” and all he really knows it what he thinks is good for the country and what will be expected of the next president.
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“I think the country needs somebody who can give us broadly shared prosperity, help families and kids, try to reduce the impact of all this huge anonymous money in our political system,” he told Zakaria. “And in a world full of challenges, keep big, bad things from happening and make as many good things happen as possible”
He did not say, however, that Trump fits that description, and he quickly brought the focus back on his wife, front-runner of the Democratic party.
“I think Hillary would be a great president, but I have no confidence in my political feel anymore,” he added.
One thing Clinton was sure about was that the recent attention to Hillary Clinton’s private email server is just an inevitable part of a presidential race. At the beginning of the year, he said, Hillary was “the most admired person in public life,” because coverage of her showed she was doing good things for the country.
“The presidential campaign happened and the nature of the coverage shifted,” he said. “I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons, and they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her.”
Nicole Brown