Failed 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton spent much of that election cycle and beyond leveling false accusations of illicit association and collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Clinton has now returned to the old anti-Trump playbook that failed her before and has resurrected her unproven accusatory smear that Trump is a "puppet" of Putin after the former president quoted a remark from the Russian president during a recent campaign rally, according to The Independent.
Rather humiliatingly, however, Clinton proved in doing so that, as before, she can dish out the insults but not take them, as she restricted the ability of social media users to comment in response to her demeaning rhetorical attack against her former political rival.
According to The Washington Post's overtly biased coverage over the past weekend of a Trump campaign rally in New Hampshire, the former president was reported to have "approvingly quoted" the autocratic Russian president while addressing his supporters.
Trump is said to have referenced critical remarks made recently by Putin about the array of criminal indictments pressed against the leading Republican presidential candidate by Democrat-aligned prosecutors at the federal and state levels.
"It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy," Trump quoted Putin as saying, then added more broadly of the world, "They’re all laughing at us."
That article from the Post, which also sharply critiqued former President Trump for speaking positively about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and for using purportedly Hitler-esque rhetoric against illegal immigrants, was then shared on the X platform by Clinton, albeit with the post's reply feature disabled to prevent any users from responding with commentary.
The X post included nothing more than a link to the article and a one-word insult against Trump -- "Puppet" -- which The Independent reported was one that she had used against her rival during the final presidential debate ahead of the 2016 election.
It was during that debate, while talking about the supposed threat to America posed by the Russian president, that then-candidate Trump said of his Democratic opponent, "Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person."
Clinton swiftly fired back, "Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States."
Trump interjected to deny the accusation and deflect it back toward his rival, but she proceeded to stumble through an obvious list of prepared talking points that linked Trump to Putin -- some of which were somewhat true but embellished while others were flat-out lies.
"It’s pretty clear you won’t admit the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race," Clinton said.
"So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation," she added. "We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing."
