Hillary Clinton’s blaming Joe Biden for Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024 to Donald Trump whitewashes the fact that specific actions by Bill and Hillary in 1999 & 2016, made Trump possible.
Jun 17, 2026
(New York Times photo of Hillary Clinton at the 92nd Street Y in NYC this week, being interviewed by the New Yorker Editor David Remnick, where she blamed Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential Campaign as the reason for Trump’s election.”)
I
If Hillary and Bill Clinton only understood the meaning of the word “grace” and slipped into the background, allowing time and perspective to be their just judge. But they are terrified of letting that happen, because what they allege of others, can easily be said of them.
Fearful of what a balanced, long-term evaluation of them would yield, the Clintons continue to blame everyone (the Russians, Bernie Sanders, a ‘vast right wing conspiracy,” and now Joe Biden) but themselves in order to temper history’s harsh decree of how they wrecked the Democratic Party and set the stage for the rise of a deranged White Supremacist, anti-democratic demagogue and soul-less grifter like Donald Trump.
From Bill Clinton’s refusal to step down and pass the torch of leadership to Al Gore in 1999 after Clinton was found to have abused his power and sexually abused Monica Lewinsky, to Hillary’s own refusal to step aside in the summer of 2016, in favor of a Biden/Booker ticket — as Party Chair Donna Brazile was suggesting — after her “abuse of her personal emails” destroyed her own candidacy for President, both Clintons wiped out the hard-fought working class work of the Democratic Party, delivering the Presidency first to George W. Bush, and then, 16-years later, to Trump.
Both Bill & Hillary’s narcissistic blindness to the grave political damage their arrogance directly caused 16 years apart, created the political conditions directly responsible for giving us another horrendous Bush presidency, a War in Iraq based upon false pretenses (which Hillary voted to support as a Senator), Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court, (to join Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush), and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, connected directly to Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking regulation act in 1999.
The consequences of that economic catastrophe were suffered overwhelmingly by millions of working families who lost their homes and modest investments — and were never made financially whole again — while the large banks and financial institutions were bailed out of any losses by the new Democratic Administration of Barack Obama. (NOTE: This week, Barack Obama’s Presidential Library opens to the public, an $850 million fortress which writer David Sirota has tagged “an Oligarch funded shrine” because of the enormous private contributions from “the bankers who cratered the economy” which Obama refused to punish: https://www.levernews.com/the-obama-shrine-brought-to-you-by-wall-street/)
The latest self-serving, Clinton “blame game,” happened this week as reported in the New York Times, on June 16, 2026, in a story headlined: “ Hillary Clinton says Biden’s Re-Election Bid Was a Terrible Mistake.” In the story, Hillary Clinton — who ran an entitled, lackluster and terrible campaign against Donald Trump in 2016 — reportedly told David Remnick of the New Yorker that:
“If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick, “whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten Donald Trump.”
Lost on Hillary Clinton, of course, was the irony that the exact same thing was said by many of us Democratic activists who believed that if her husband stepped aside after his power and sexual abuse of Lewinsky and his impeachment, and opened up the Democratic nominating process in 2000 to either Vice-President Al Gore, or some other Democrat — a governor, or senator or anybody else — the outcome of the 2000 election may have been far different. And, the identical thing was said about Hillary’s own candidacy in 2016, crippled by her own arrogance about her emails, which she finally acknowledged to Remnick this week, undid her campaign and helped hand the Presidency to Trump. Anybody else but Hillary Clinton “would have beaten Donald Trump,” in 2016.
Equally suspect in the role elite establishment connections played in the 2024 election was when Kamala Harris’ first act was to call Hillary & Bill Clinton to discuss running to succeed Biden in 2024. Not surprisingly, establishment corporate Democrats running the 2024 Democratic National Convention gave prominent speaking roles to BOTH Hillary and Bill Clinton while many of us progressive Democratic activists — who didn’t want Joe Biden to serve more than one-term in the first place — screamed about how elevating the Clintons in the 2024 campaign would hand the election to Trump.
After having gone all-in for Kamala Harris’ election, I was so infuriated by the prominent appearance of the Clintons at the 2024 DNC that I complained about it in an August 18, 2024 piece on Substack entitled: “Why Are the Clintons STILL in the Spotlight? which I also circulated to members of the Democratic National Committee:
Why Are The Clintons STILL In The Spotlight?
·August 18, 2024
The pertinent section of that piece :
“If there’s an Achilles Heel in this moment — which should be all about Kamala Harris and our future — it is dregging up the ghosts of Clintons’ past, which, I suppose, was inevitable with the presence of John Podesta and Neera Tandem, lurking among Biden’s team, and the Zelig-like, power-sniffing appearance of Gene Sperling on the new Harris crew.
I’m sure some of the old Clintonistas on the DNC and involved with the convention planning who cannot escape the narrow-box thinking that gave us Donald Trump, argued that Bill “must” be featured as a former President, and Hillary must also speak because she almost broke the glass ceiling 8 years ago — although the visual of Podesta delivering Hillary’s campaign eulogy under the still-intact glass roof of NYC’s Javits Center still gives me night terrors.
I’d rather hear from Liz Cheney instead of Hillary — who ran an abominable campaign for President in 2016, utterly ignoring the Midwest, and enabling Trump to get elected — and from Laura or George W. Bush on the night when Bill Clinton is slated to bring his wax-museum presence to the podium. A double-dose of the Clintons is hardly the way to appeal to undecided voters in 2024 who only voted for Trump eight years earlier because they found the alternative not “like-able enough” as Barack Obama hoped Hillary would be.”
But they wouldn’t be the oligarch-loving, self-aggrandizing Clintons — whose minions are STILL trying to resist change and reject new leadership into the Democratic Party — if they didn’t maneuver for protecting the status quo, and the institutions which have supported them, and become ossified, like their supporters.
Ten years ago, after spending $3,000 of my own money to travel to North Carolina for a month and do Voter Protection in an open-carry, swing state for Hillary’s 2016 campaign, I saw the hollowness of Hillary’s own campaign for President from the inside and wrote about it 2-weeks following her loss to the most corrupt individual in the history of the United States to seek the Presidency:
Writing on Medium.com, my piece on November 23, 2016, was entitled “Can a Campaign that Lacked Courage Find it Now?” (https://medium.com/@stevevillano/can-a-presidential-campaign-that-lacked-courage-find-it-now-49be468881d5):
“I was going to wait longer than two weeks after the Presidential Election of 2016 to tell this insider’s story about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President.
The looming deadline of this Friday, November 25, (2016) for Clinton supporters to step-up and challenge questionable vote tallies and voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania has compelled me to come forward now. Bold, legal actions on the part of the Clinton campaign — unlike the tepid response of Al Gore 16 years ago — hold the possibility of setting aside this year’s election results on the basis of constitutional and voting rights violations.
Whether or not the Clinton campaign has the courage to do it is another question entirely. What’s at stake is nothing less than American democracy, and the rights of free citizens to vote.
I experienced the campaign’s lack of courage first hand when I traveled to North Carolina to do Voter Protection for Hillary Clinton for the last four weeks before the election. As a Californian, with friends and former labor union colleagues in Raleigh, I chose to work in North Carolina — at my own expense — for two reasons: 1. The state’s history of voter suppression in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby; 2) the critical importance of North Carolina as a swing or “checkmate” state for the Clinton campaign.
The North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign knew I was an activist writer when they agreed to take me on as a full-time, unpaid volunteer at their Raleigh, NC, headquarters. I was assigned to do Voter Protection, because of my law degree and my expressed interest in the area.
During my first week of working with the campaign, I studied the State’s Election Law, the Federal Judge’s July decision overturning North Carolina’s Voter “suppression” law of 2013 as “surgical discrimination,” and sat in on two training sessions for citizens volunteering to participate in voter protection activities at the polls. I was impressed by the volunteers: law-abiding, fellow Baby Boomers, passionately devoted to protecting people’s right to vote, as their civic duty.
On Sunday, October 16, 2016, following a terrific Voter Protection training session in Wilmington, NC — a city with a history of White Supremacist violence against local Black leadership (not unlike the murder of hundreds of Black people on “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma) I awoke to the news that a GOP campaign office in Hillsborough, Orange County, was firebombed during the night. The office was rarely used by GOP campaign workers, a local Republican operative told me, and the message and technique of the single Molotov cocktail bombing was suspicious. Within hours of the bombing, Donald Trump took to Twitter to pin the illegal act on “Hillary Clinton supporters” and “Democrats” with no evidence. Having worked with both of those groups, I knew those charges were patently false, and smacked of a too-quickly issued cover for a crime, still unsolved five weeks later.
So, I did what I do. I wrote about the incident as someone with first-hand knowledge of the decent people accused of a crime they did not commit. To me it smelled like the “Reichstag Fire,” of 1933, when the Nazi’s blamed the communists and Jews for starting a blaze in the German Parliament — a fire started by the Nazis themselves.
The National Memo, published my piece, and I circulated it on my blog and on medium.com. The piece was a powerful defense of the North Carolina Democrats and their respect for the rule of law and The National Memo’s headline reflected that: “Why North Carolina Democrats Would Never Bomb Orange County GOP Office.” Among the reasons I gave was that Orange County, NC — which contains the University of North Carolina — was one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the nation, giving Barack Obama over 70% of its vote each time he ran.
Monday morning, October 17, when the article was read by The National Memo’s 300,000 subscribers, the Clinton’s Campaign, was so upset by my article (particularly the paragraph where I wrote of the role the Reichstag Fire played in German political history) that they told me to either “take the piece down” or leave the campaign by the end of the day. The young, campaign operative who directed me to to “take down the piece” had no idea what the Reichstag Fire was.
I refused to “take down” the piece, citing my First Amendment Rights to write what I pleased, both as a professional writer and as a private citizen. I was an unpaid volunteer doing Voter Protection, who traveled from California to North Carolina on my own dime and the campaign could not censor me. The Clinton Campaign’s 20-something-year-old- paid staffer was officious and inflexible, fearing any fallout that could come from my article. He insisted that I “take it down”, or leave the campaign office immediately. Again, I refused to “take my article down” — a preposterous request, since the piece had already been circulated nationwide around the internet. I was physically escorted out of the campaign’s Raleigh office by mid-afternoon for being “too radical.”
I spent the rest of my four weeks in North Carolina extensively covering the elections across the state, interviewing Trump and Clinton voters, attending events from the State Fair to rallies with both Obamas, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, closely examining the history of voter suppression of African American voters in the state, and writing a half-dozen stories for various media outlets. I came away with an in-depth view of the kind of cautious, take-no-chances campaign waged by the Clinton team in North Carolina and across the nation, that made it possible for the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners Trump campaign to prevail.”
Now, 10 years later, the attention-starved Clintons — knowing full well that an even more malleable and insatiable media STILL can’t resist anything they say — have focused on a new and easy target — Joe Biden — for their endless circle of blame that goes back at least two decades, and never, ever, ever includes themselves.
Who will be Hillary — or Bill’s — next target for blame? Bernie Sanders? Oh right, they attacked Bernie already. Graham Platner? The Maine Senatorial candidate that establishment Dems love to hate? AOC, when she primaries Chuck Schumer in New York State in 2028? Candidates rejecting AIPAC money, and calling Israel’s actions Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon? Candidates campaigning for a Wealth Tax on oligarchs in California and around the country?
Just go away, Hillary and Bill. No one wants to participate in your blame game anymore. It’s not now, nor has it ever been, productive. Stop wasting precious air, and internet (and print) time attacking us — the enemy is already within the gates, destroying the White House, and the nation, and taking a wrecking ball to every single human and constitutional right. Why are you still searching for others to blame? Accept your own responsibility and move on.
Fold up your large shadows, and let a thousand new flowers bloom. Your season under the kleig lights is over. Get out there and raise a ton of money for Voting Rights in local communities around the country or for Jamie Raskin’s Freedom Summer Initiative.
But, please: have the good sense to be anonymous about it, which according to Maimonides is the highest form of giving. Your day in the sun is done. Have the grace to know when it’s time to go.