Sports journalist and personality Stephen A. Smith went viral after criticizing recent remarks by Hillary Clinton that voters dissatisfied with a Biden-Trump matchup in this year’s presidential election should “get over” themselves.
“I don’t think it was a very wise statement on her part,” Smith said on CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip. “How did that work out for her in 2016?”
“You can look at her not campaigning in Wisconsin in the last days, not campaigning in Pennsylvania in the last days. You can look at some of the stuff that they were saying about her that sort of distracted things from where it should have been in terms of Comey and his report from the FBI,” Smith said. “You can bring up a whole bunch of things, but at the end of the day the last thing you need to do is to do anything that could agitate a potential voter in this particular election.”
Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to former President Donald Trump, was a guest on The Tonight Show on Monday night, where Fallon asked her what she’d say to voters who are upset that the contest is between President Joe Biden and Trump.
“Get over yourself, those are choices,” Clinton answered.
“Yeah, love that!” Fallon said while the audience cheered and applauded.
Clinton then explained her opinion: that one of the candidates, Biden, is old, effective, compassionate, has a heart, and really cares about people, while the other, Trump, is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.
“I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice, really, I don’t understand it,” Clinton said. “But we have to go through the election and hopefully people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question, what kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of democracy we’re going to have, and people who blow that off aren’t paying attention.”
Smith told Philip in his television appearance responding to Clinton that he wasn’t voting for Trump, not least of all because he has dozens of felony counts and four indictments against him, as well as two impeachments. But he noted that other voters were different.
“I’m not voting for him, I’ve said that to a lot of people … but at the end of the day what I’m saying is, at some point in time you’ve got to take into account what the voters are thinking about,” Smith said, explaining that tens of millions of voters don’t care about Trump’s legal troubles or whether he is guilty of the crimes he’s being accused of.
“They don’t care about the 91 counts. They’re thinking about their lives,” Smith explained, saying that many candidates seem detached from what the voters are actually feeling.
“Nobody wants to hear that from Hillary Rodham Clinton at this particular moment in time … that doesn’t exactly encourage [voters] from getting out of their seats and going to the polls.”
On Smith’s YouTube show in February, he said that Trump was a shoo-in to be reelected, even if he did become a convicted felon, because of Democratic Party policies on immigration.
Smith pointed to news stories about migrant families being given prepaid credit cards in New York cities for food and baby supplies, saying that illegal immigration had become “incredibly pervasive” under the Biden administration and that Biden had “capitulated to the extreme left.”
Worries about Biden being able to defeat Trump this cycle have also started piling up among his own donors and campaign team, reported the Washington Post.
“We all know this is a jump ball,” one Biden donor told the paper. “In 2016 we were reading Nate Silver, and we weren’t worried at all … [This time, W]e all are prepared to lose.”
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.