Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke in Melbourne Thursday with Australia's first female prime minister Julia Gillard. The two discussed misogyny in politics and Clinton yet again blamed sexism for her 2016 loss, implying that the U.S. just couldn’t handle a leader who is a woman.
“There is still a very large proportion of the population that is uneasy with women in positions of leadership,” Clinton told Gillard, “and so the easiest way to kind of avoid having to look at someone on her merits is to dismiss her on her looks.”
Gillard compared the chants of “lock her up” that Clinton faced during the election to “the Salem Witch Trials.”
"There is this fear, there is this anger, even rage about women seeking power, women exercising power and people fall back on these attacks like you’re a witch or you should go to prison,” Clinton agreed. “It’s not a majority, thank goodness, it’s not, but it’s a very vocal minority at least in my country. And sometimes these tropes are very much part of the press coverage.”
Clinton continued to insist that her opponents who claimed not to be against women have since shown that they are misogynists.
“People would all the time say ‘well I’m not against women’ as they’d be wearing a t-shirt saying these horrible things, ‘I’m just not for that woman,’” she said. “Okay fine so the election happens, forget that I get 3 million more votes, it’s over and we go on to what he’s going to do next but as soon as other women, women with high profiles who might someday run for president began speaking out, the same attacks started all over again.”
"For men, likeability and professional success go hand in hand," Clinton claimed. "But with women, it's the exact opposite."
Clinton also repeated claims that Trump was “stalking” her during a town hall debate. She said it was “very clear that (he) was stalking me, looming over me, trying to intimidate me and he was doing it very deliberately.”
“Do I turn to him and say you’re not going to intimidate me, back up creep, but in the end I didn’t — I know whatever I say or however I phrase it, it could come across as looking like I was angry, or looking like I couldn’t take it,” she explained. “And if she can’t deal with Trump, how will she deal with Putin. So how do we deal with that?
For women, she claimed, “the balance between how much emotion to show and how much to hold in becomes a complex calculation.”
This is not the first time Clinton has blamed her loss on misogyny while on foreign soil. Clinton claimed in India recently that Trump voters were sexist and racist.
"His whole campaign: 'Make America Great Again' was looking backwards,” she said of Trump. “You know, you didn't like black people getting rights, you don't like women, you know, getting jobs, you don't want to you know see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I'm going to solve it.'”