Clinton asks supporters to ‘imagine’ America if Trump wins
DETROIT — “Imagine Jan. 20, 2017,” Hillary Clinton asked a couple of thousand supporters on Friday afternoon. “And imagine that my opponent is taking the oath of office in front of the Capitol.”
Her fans booed.
“Imagine having a president who demeans women and mocks the disabled, who insults African-Americans and Latinos and Muslims, who personally engages in busting unions and preventing people from having the right to bargain collectively,” she continued as her supporters booed more.
As Clinton’s lead has shrunk just a few days before Election Day, she has started describing a potential Donald Trump presidency in more vivid detail to voters in battleground states. At event after event, Clinton is leading her supporters through visualization exercises — walking them through Trump’s winning on Tuesday, their feelings of disappointment the next day, his inauguration, and eventually Trump’s settling into the Oval Office.
“What would your life be like if he were in the White House?” Clinton asked earlier this week in Las Vegas before arguing that a wide swath of America would see a worse quality of life under a President Trump.
Clinton also asks her supporters to imagine how badly they’d feel if Trump wins because they didn’t do enough in these final days. “So think how you’ll feel if there was something you could have done, but didn’t, on November the 9th if this doesn’t work,” Clinton told a Sanford, Fla., crowd earlier this week.
She urged them to vote so they would be able to tell their grandchildren they did all they could in the 2016 election — “when everything was on the line.”
The tactic comes as the campaign hopes to turn out Democrats, even those who are wary of Clinton, who still has low favorable ratings.
Clinton’s campaign further hammered the message home with a Web video featuring a newscast a year into an imaginary Trump presidency. In it, Trump has instituted a ban on Muslims entering the country, begins deporting millions of immigrants, and defaults on the U.S. debt. The video ends with the slogan, “Reality has no rewind.”
The Democratic nominee also frequently quotes Michelle Obama to make the case that Trump would not change once he became president and that how he behaves as a candidate is how he’d behave in the White House.
“Now, Michelle Obama, who says so many wise and wonderful things, she said the presidency doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are,” Clinton said in Detroit. “And I think we’ve seen who Donald Trump is.”
Trump has debuted his own version of this tactic, warning his supporters at recent rallies that a Clinton presidency would be bogged down in investigations and scandals. “Here we go again with Clinton, the impeachment and the problems,” Trump told his fans at a Thursday rally in Jacksonville, Fla. “She is likely to be under investigation for many, many years, also likely to conclude with a criminal trial.”
“This is not what we need in our country,” he added. “This is going to be a mess for many years to come.”
