In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Chelsea Clinton was asked about accusations of sexual misconduct that several women have made against her father, former President Bill Clinton.
Cosmo asked, “Donald Trump has called your dad an abuser of women, and your mom his enabler. What do you think of his attacks on your parents?”
Former President Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea look on as Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a "get out to caucus" event at Washington High School Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Jan. 30. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“I find what Donald Trump — and many of the Republicans, because it's not only Mr. Trump — say about Americans far more troubling than what he says about my parents,” Clinton replied. “And people have been attacking my parents my whole life, so maybe I am just inured to that, but I tend to think that people who are at the forefront of progress do attract more negative attention from those who want to protect the status quo.”
Clinton said that the Republican presidential candidates have infused the election cycle with “broad-based misogyny and sexism and racism and Islamophobia and jingoism and homophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
“All of that is coming out from the Republican side. That somehow has become normalized because it's now just so common, not only [for] Mr. Trump, but for other candidates to say things that I think are so fundamentally un-American,” Clinton continued.
Former President Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea arrive to introduce Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at Abraham Lincoln High School in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 31. (IM Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
“To call into the question the right of any person who has chosen to come to our country with the intent of working hard and making a contribution and wants a chance at the American Dream, to somehow say that that person disqualifies from being here because of the country they come from, their sexual orientation, or the religion they adhere to — that's what I find far more troubling,” Clinton said. “And I find that troubling because that does seem to have become unexceptional in a really perverse way. The hate speech that has somehow become one of the main calling cards of Republicans, I find really, really troubling.”
After her remarks about Trump, Clinton said she is friends with his daughter, Ivanka Trump.
“I am absolutely friends with Ivanka, and I am grateful for her friendship,” Clinton said.
“And I'm always going to believe — because this is how my parents raised me — that friendship is more important than politics,” she added. “And we were friends before the campaign and I have no doubt that we'll be friends after the campaign. But no, we don't talk about politics, because that's not where our friendship began and it's certainly, thankfully, not where our friendship will end.”
Asked about her mother’s Democratic rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton defended her mother as “a real progressive” who “has a record of making progress.”
