Bill Clinton on Trump: He Knows How to Get “Angry White People” to Vote For Him

In a local newspaper article from earlier this month that only ever appeared in print, but has now found its inevitable way to the Internet, Bill Clinton had some choice words for president-elect Donald J. Trump. “He doesn’t know much,” the former president said of the man who defeated his wife in the 2016 election, but “one thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him.”

That’s far from the only fun detail in the Record-Review, a paper out of New York, near where the Clintons reside in Chappaqua. Here are a few other morsels form a brief interview reporters held with Clinton after an accidental meeting at a bookstore in Katonah, NY (“he needed to talk as eagerly as we wanted to listen,” said the writer):

—Clinton said that a person would “need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on” with the Russian cyber hacks, and how they were designed to help Trump win the election.

—He said that Trump called him the day after the election and behaved in a friendly way “like it was 15 years ago.” He at least gave Hillary credit for being “tougher than I thought she’d be.”

—He threw shade at Trump’s claim that he’d won a landslide victory: “Landslide? I got something like 370 electoral votes. That was a landslide.”

—He blamed FBI Director James Comey’s late email intervention for Hillary’s loss, saying that it “cost her the election.”

—When told that Trump’s transition team had dismissed the new intelligence on Russia, he said, “these are the same people who said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

The impromptu interview session involved ten people, and leads to this question: Is Bill Clinton the political version of Bill Murray, showing up at odd places, saying and doing interesting things, and then vanishing just as quickly as he materialized? I like to think the answer is yes, and somehow, it seems like the perfect role for him.