He doesn’t have a good word to say about her now, but Donald Trump heaped praise on Hillary Clinton in a recently uncovered video — calling her “a great woman and a good woman,” among other superlatives.
The GOP presidential nominee — who labeled his rival “such a nasty woman” in their final debate — dished out the flattery during a 2008 interview with the TV channel NY1.
“I think she’s a wonderful woman. I think she’s a little bit misunderstood. You know, Hillary is a very smart woman. A very tough woman. That’s fine. She’s also a very nice person. I know Hillary and I know her husband very well. They’re fine people,” the mogul gushed.
Trump also had kind words for Bill Clinton.
“I think she is a great wife to a president and I think Bill Clinton was a great president. You know, you look at the country then, the economy was doing great,” Trump said.
The compliments are a far cry from Trump’s rhetoric today, when he constantly rails about “Crooked Hillary” and exhorts his supporters to chant “Lock her up!” at his raucous rallies.
A Hillary Clinton presidency, he says, “would be a disaster” for the country, and could only happen if the fix were in. “It’s rigged, folks!” he claims.
Trump has been equally scathing in his attacks on Bubba — especially after at least a dozen women have come forward to accuse the ex-reality TV star of sexual predations.
Bill Clinton, he says, is “a rapist” and much worse than he is because of his treatment of Monica Lewinsky and others.
But eight years ago, the Clintons got nothing but love from their current nemesis.
“I’m not knocking the other side,” he said then about President Obama, then Hillary’s primary opponent. “You know, you want to win a battle, so if it gets a little bit nasty, it is politics, and politics is a tough game. But I thought she was perhaps unnecessarily roughed up.”
Trump also said that Clinton was “going to go down” in history “at a minimum as a great senator” — but also hinted that her political career wasn’t done yet, saying “her history is far from being over.”