I got to tell you, before you start, I've gotten so many texts from people who are your fans. And the texts all go like, 'Oh, wow. You're going to be with Kara Swisher. What about Top Libert?'
Yes. Holy moly. She's going to be with me. We're going to be together. All right. Ready? You ready?
You're born ready. Anyway, okay. Hi everyone. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Hillary Clinton. Welcome to High Stakes, our new series from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Madam Secretary, I really wanted to—first of all, what should I call you? I call you Hills.
You can call me Hillary. You can call me Madam Secretary. You can call me Your Excellency.
Your Excellency. Do you have a preference?
Whatever you want to call me.
I'll call you Barbara. No. Is there a title you like or not? I'm just curious what you prefer.
I answer to nearly anything. So, you know what? Have at it.
All right. Hey, lady. I really wanted to talk more about politics as we head into the midterms, as you know, and I thought, who better to help me out? But first, before we get into it, I have to ask you a question that's on everybody's mind. I read a headline that comedian Pete Davidson is having a lot of tattoos removed, but he's keeping the one he has of your face. Any thoughts?
Well, I am deeply honored. I seriously am. You know, I know Pete. I met Pete when I appeared on SNL, I don't know, 10 or so years ago. And as people who follow him know, he lost his father, a firefighter on 9/11. And I had done a lot of work as senator working to help the firefighters and others who responded to that horrible, tragic attack. And I just really liked him and kind of, you know, connected, and we've seen each other off and on over the years. And when I learned he had a tattoo of my face on his leg, I frankly was pretty flattered, to be honest. It could have, it could have been other places. It could have been other places or it could have been left off completely, you know, then I would have never had the opportunity to thank him for including me in his—
—extensive tattoo collection.
You don't have a tattoo, do you?
Six tattoos. When did you start getting them?
When? As soon as I could. I love them so much. I love them.
Yes, I do. I know. It's really bad. I have one on my leg that is a ginkgo leaf that everyone thinks is a shamrock, which upsets me because why would I put a shamrock on my leg?
You can now put my face on your leg, too.
I am not putting your face in my next tattoo. My son might after listening to this. And I have my kids and I have all manner of things. I love them. They're my favorite thing. Anyway, you wouldn't get one. If you got one, what would it be?
I just cannot imagine getting one. It's not anything that has ever appealed to me. I think it's fine for anybody who wants them to have them. But, you know, sitting there and having somebody stick a needle in my body is just not on my list of what I want to do in my life.
Well, maybe by the end of this you can have my face tattooed on you. Anyway, it could be. I mean, this is a high-stakes podcast and that would be a high-stakes tattoo.
High-stakes kind of thing. Yeah.
So let's talk about that, about why we're calling it High Stakes and why you wanted to do this.
Well, first of all, I really think that this election is one of the most critical. People say that all the time and I know eyes roll. I get it. But we are at a point in our history that if we don't reverse the disastrous policies of this administration and everything from cost of living to war and peace, we're going to have a hard time recovering no matter what happens at the presidential election. So to me, this is a really high-stakes election. And I've done a lot of events raising money for people, speaking on behalf of candidates, doing what I can to support Democrats running in the House and the Senate races.
But I also think that lots of times the coverage of elections is very focused on the horse race. Who's up? Who's down? What do the polls say? And in fact, this is an election that really turns on a lot of substance. You know what's happening to people when they see the cost of everything ballooning. You know what is going on in the world, that we are losing our leadership and our leverage that will keep us safer and give us a better future. All of these issues are really important, and I think talking about it, trying to engage in a conversation with voters, is the best way to highlight what's at stake.
How are you feeling about the midterms right now?
I'm feeling pretty good, Kara. Nothing is—
Because last time we talked, when you were guest hosting on Pivot, you were like worried. You were more worried than I was.
Well, I was worried because I was waiting for the huge money to drop, and it has now dropped. The amount of money that is going into these races from Republican supporters, mostly Elon Musk, which is—well, Elon Musk is, I don't know, is he like at 300 million or some huge, huge number—and so I was a little worried. I was, because money can distort what's at stake and it can convince people to vote against their own interests. It can convince people to vote for people who could care less about them. All of that we know. And now that I've seen the effect of this huge money drop, I'm less worried because I think it hasn't changed the underlying reality of what's going on in the country and how people are feeling about their lives and their families and what's at stake. So I'm feeling increasingly hopeful and even positive, as long as people turn out and vote.
Did you see something of that? Because again, you were worried before. Is it money? To me, money doesn't always matter. Like Elon spent 25 million in Wisconsin last year. It didn't work for lots of different reasons. He's mostly repellent to voters on his own. But when does money count and not count in your experience?
That's a really good question. And I think money counts when it is effectively deployed. And what is happening in this election is that the Republicans are really in a box of their own making. They can't figure out how to effectively deploy it because the guy who is the cult leader of their party refuses to admit that the cost of things are going up and he is largely responsible. And so they can't figure out how to attack their Democratic opponents because the Democrats are basically just saying, 'Here are the problems. Here's what we're going to do about them.' And they have to dance around Trump and his fantasy world. And that puts them in a tight spot about how to spend this huge amount of money that they've got.
So I think that when it's effectively deployed—and they've used culture issues for years now, back when gay marriage, before it was decided, they tried to and successfully fought an election in 2004 over it, trans issues, abortion obviously—but this time they have done a few feints back toward all of this cultural warfare. But at the end of the day, I think more and more voters are saying, 'What does that have to do with the cost of gas or the cost of beef at the supermarket or my healthcare premium?' So I think they have a real problem effectively deploying the huge amount of money that they have at their disposal. What would you do if you were them?
Well, I don't want to tell them. I'm not going to give advice to them because I think they are ruining our country. They know how to tear people down. That's their expertise. So if they go after people hard enough and find some kind of sweet spot, that can really undermine a candidate's story. But look, they just tried that with James Terico. They made up this crazy, bananas story about him being in Ohio, instead of what actually happened, which is that he had the flu and he was really, really sick and he's now back on the campaign trail.
And look, as somebody who had pneumonia in 2016 and they painted me like I was on death's door, you know, it is an argument, but in the reality of what's going on in our world today, it's not as salient, and so I think—
Can I just press a button on that? Because when that happened to you, they had you falling over, you were fainting, you—as I recall—all manner of things. And of course Donald Trump is quantumly sicker right now, look, and they hide it, right? How did you even react to that?
Well, what happened is that it was, I think, the Friday before September 11th back in 2016, and I had been sniffling and feeling bad, and I finally went to the doctor, which is hard to do when you're on the campaign trail. And they tested me and they said, 'Oh, you've got pneumonia. You need to take like five or six days off.' I said, 'I can't do that.' And my doctor said, 'Well, that's what you should do.' And I thought, 'Well, yeah, that's what I should do.'
But I got to keep running for campaigning, and I have to show up on 9/11 because it means a lot to me, since, as you know, I was a senator. So I kept going, which was a mistake, but they did have the video of me struggling to get to the car to be able to take some breaths and recover myself.
From my perspective, it worked, because it was just papering—social media papering. Social media: I was dying. I was lying about my health. This is from a guy who has never given us an honest medical report ever. Ever.
So it can be effective, right? It can be effective, but it's one of those things now that, first of all, it has to be true. And you know what? They said James Terico was in Ohio at a mental health facility. Totally untrue. Easily disproven.
Yeah. It's really interesting how they continue to push on the same things. So let's get into some of the top stories, because over the next couple of weeks, I said we're going to talk about top political headlines as well as issues that matter most to voters. And the reason I wanted to do this with you is—I think we talked about it in this New York Times story—is we were at a dinner and you were so sharp and fresh on a lot of the things. And one of the tropes about you is that people don't really know you. And I think that's actually true. Like there's a sort of in-the-room Hillary. If you knew her in the room, do you push back against that?
I feel like I'm a walking Rorschach test and people kind of see what they want to see in me, what they're capable of seeing in me, or what is familiar to them. And so I understand that my presence, my arrival on the public scene in such a dramatic way, when Bill was elected president, then when I ran for the Senate. So first of all, I was first lady, I wore pants, I tried to reform health care. I mean, it was very confusing—
Very confusing to people, and I get that. But I made the choices that I thought were right for me and that I was trying to help serve my country and all the rest of it. So when I ran for the Senate, it was like, 'Oh my gosh, I don't know what to think about her. I don't know.' And so trying to create a kind of 360-degree holistic picture of me has been very hard, because I came into people's consciousness at a time when tropes and caricatures and stereotypes about women in politics and first ladies and all of that were pretty accepted.
You took a lot of the arrows, right? There was actually a vast right-wing conspiracy. I feel like I have been in the forefront of so many of the changes in women's lives—about women's choices, who we are, what kind of opportunities and rights we're supposed to have—and that's controversial. So I don't fault anybody for trying to figure it out. I get it. I get it. But I've been on the scene long enough and I have a long enough public record; people can judge me.
Yeah. People don't seem to care anymore.
I don't care. But I also know that I have always been true to myself. I've always been who I am and cared about the things that I care about. And so people can either accept it or not. But it is not any longer something that I'm going to spend any time worrying about.
No, not at all. And please don't.
And one of the things that's really important is—you're not running for anything but your mouth, right? Essentially, so you don't have to be on talking points. You don't have to be careful.
Well, my approval rating is always sky high when I'm not running for something. That is always one of the ironies: as long as I am in service to either a man like my husband or President Obama, or I am serving the people of New York—once I finally broke through and got elected twice—I am very popular. And then once I say, 'Well, you know what? I think I could do a really good job, like, I don't know, being president,' then, oh my goodness, that's very scary. So, yeah, I get all of that.
I mean, you're really scary. You're not even in the top 10 of scaring people I know. Anyway, let's get to some of today's top stories, including the growing backlash to President Trump's announcement—let's show this off—that he's easing sanctions on Russia so it can dump hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel onto the global market, with more than a million more tons on the way. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pushing back. Diesel is averaging about $6.30 a gallon, up more than 70% for the year. Regular gas is close to $4.40. Trump is clearly betting cheaper fuel matters to voters more than punishing Putin. Is he right? Talk a little bit about this.
I think he is so wrong in every way, and here's why. Number one, let's assume that there was not a law against doing what he's doing—because actually there is a bipartisan law that was passed because we're not supposed to be encouraging and supporting Vladimir Putin in his aggressive, terrible war against Ukraine. There's also sanctions that are in effect. So he clearly is violating the law, violating even sanctions that his own administration put on. But it also is too late; it's not going to have any effect.
And even more significantly, based on everything I've been trying to read to understand, I'm not sure it's real. We have a lot of information about the global oil market, both gas and diesel. And it's not like there aren't gas lines in Russia. It's not like there hasn't been a steady stream of attacks by Ukraine on Russian energy infrastructure. So I don't know where these tons of diesel are going to come from. But let's assume that somewhere Vladimir Putin has some huge reserve that, for Donald Trump paying him billions of dollars—some of which I'm sure goes into his pocket or their pockets, I'm not positive about that—he's going to start shipping it. Well, it's not going to affect the midterm elections, in my opinion.
It's the announcement. It's the drama. It's the performance. He's hoping people will not pay attention to the details. Kara, he's hoping that his announcing it makes it so. That's really how he governs. He announces something, he signs an executive order. Doesn't matter what the laws are. Doesn't matter what the reality is. He has a view that if he tells this to the American people—particularly the people that have voted for him, who have believed him in the past—that they will just take it on his word. And that's kind of running out of steam. And as you said, both Republicans and Democrats are pushing back on it.
So did Zelenskyy, you know. And Putin kept bombing Ukraine during this entire thing where he said there was an energy ceasefire.
But there's one other thing I want to mention, because clearly the diesel announcement has been in the news and the energy infrastructure attacks have been in the news. But Ukraine has just done something really significant by attacking the huge data server farms in Russia and taking a lot of the Russian capacity offline—going after the energy infrastructure, but also going after the internet structure—I thought was really smart.
So people don't know this: Ukrainian drones have been knocking out these data centers, including service at Yandex, which is Russia's Google, essentially.
But symbolically Zelenskyy used it, like, we're bringing attention to that idea, which I think is widespread. Bots are a real problem, but it's really an interesting idea that this matters as much as diesel. It could matter as much as diesel, and this is what Putin has been using, given that country is rotten at the core from an economic perspective. Why not hit us online, which I think they've been doing effectively—from your perspective.
So, another thing online: Trump said he's still deciding whether to allow a live stream of the execution to go ahead, and the Pentagon announced plans to live stream Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan's firing squad execution on December 3rd at Fort Hood. The backlash is coming from all sides. The head of the Catholic bishops called it barbaric. JD Vance says he won't watch. Talk a little bit about this, because to me it's heinous. It's completely heinous to do something like this.
You're 100% right. I mean, it's barbaric. It is, in my view, un-American. And there are reasons besides just the revulsion that I think decent people have toward this prospect and the very strong reaction from everybody from the Pope to Republican office holders.
You know, I think that when we saw the executions 10, 12 years ago by ISIS of beheadings, American and European and other hostages, I think we all just recoiled at the barbarism of videoing the execution, the shooting in the head of people who were taken hostage by these terrorist groups. And it was used to stir up radicals and extremists, but it was also, in a way, backfiring on them because I think the spectacle of it was so disgusting.
Now here we have the United States government saying they want to do the same. It's not only that it's, in my view, immoral, wrong, every other condemnatory word we can come up with—I think it could become a recruiting tool. It could become, in a funny way, a message to radical jihadist extremists that you can die a martyr's death: if you go kill Americans, you will be immortalized in this execution squad, essentially.
And I will just add that, you know, when we did the Bin Laden operation, one of the issues we had to deal with is what to do with Bin Laden's body. And obviously the body—the Navy SEALs took it from Abbottabad, Pakistan across the border to Afghanistan to confirm the identity. We believed we knew, but we needed DNA and all the rest of it to confirm the identity. What do we do with the body? And we had a really long and thoughtful discussion about that and brought in experts, people who understand the psychology of terrorist thinking and radicalization online, because this is a god to them. Correct. Yeah.
Because if we had published pictures of his body and the wounds that he had suffered in the firefight that took place beside that compound, we would have martyred him in a very visually dramatic way. And we didn't do that. And we also didn't bury him somewhere that could become a pilgrimage place for extremists. He was buried appropriately under Islamic law at sea.
And so what Trump and Hegseth said—because they don't know history, they don't know psychology, they don't—
Can I interject for one sec? They did that with Hitler, too. They covered the bunker versus letting it become a place of worship by Nazis.
If you want to go ahead and give a green light to extremists, go ahead with this execution that you're going to live stream. It will have exactly the opposite effect of what you think it would have.
Can I ask you, when you were in those discussions, did anyone think they should publish the pictures?
Well, because I think some people said we want to prove it, you know, because we could also have a problem with the fantasists online saying it wasn't him, it didn't really happen. You know how they lie about everything. And so maybe we need to make sure that nobody can claim that it wasn't him, it didn't happen, that he's somewhere now back hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan again. But that was, after a really thoughtful discussion, not viewed as the smartest way to proceed.
So yes, we had a full and vigorous conversation, which someday maybe we'll talk about. I saw that as a really good example of smart presidential decision-making, from the moment we were all gathered in the Situation Room until we made our recommendations to President Obama.
Right now, in this case, what do you think he's going to do here? He was all for it and now he isn't. I mean, he does love spectacle, right? This is a man who loves spectacle, but he's allowing Hegseth, who seems moronic, to take the lead here.
Well, I think that this is really part and parcel of who Pete Hegseth is. He's not competent. He doesn't know what he's doing. But he's a TV personality who looks the part, and Trump entrusted him with our military, which has turned out to be a terrible decision. And I think if Trump comes to his senses, this could backfire on him politically, as well as what I worry about, which is the recruitment of zealots and extremists—
—because even the most conservative Christian or any religious person who has supported Trump has to have qualms about this. And I think that this could backfire spectacularly on him. So maybe he's beginning to get that message, because he's apparently been receiving it from a lot of sources. And when his own vice president says, 'I wouldn't watch that,' that says something, too.
Yeah. The last public execution led to the backlash that they never showed them again, right? That people really were... I have a feeling he's not going to let it happen.
I would like to think that that's where he ends up, for all the right reasons.
Well, we'll see. You mentioned earlier Elon Musk. He has poured $276 million into Republican groups since July, making him by far the biggest donor to the midterms. The biggest chunk, $158 million, went to the GOP's main Senate super PAC. That's one of the largest political checks ever written. It beats what the Democratic side raised from everybody combined in the last quarter. Another $76 million is paying for a door-knocking army—nearly 3,000 canvassers in Texas is getting the most attention. The money showed up right before Republicans started spending big for Ken Paxton, who was apparently partying in the Gulf States with people on the run. With the polls forecasting—like, I want you to drill down just a little bit more on this. Are you worried about this money in certain places versus other places?
Well, in the really tight districts, the so-called purple districts or even the red districts that we think we have a chance of flipping, let's remember people are used to voting for Republicans more often than not. And so if enough money is used to really turn out the hardcore Trump base, which is down to about 30% of the electorate, so that they actually get out and vote—which right now I think is kind of in question because they're feeling a little disillusioned themselves, from what I'm seeing in research—then yeah, on the margins it could make a difference.
And what I'm thinking about as to why Elon Musk is spending all this money with the super PAC, spending all this money getting canvassers—what's their message? If you're knocking on somebody's door in Texas and you're in a red district that is at threat of being flipped, what are you telling those people at the doors? What is your message? I would love to know what the canvassers Musk is paying for are given in terms of a script, because are they saying you got to stick with Trump? Are they saying that Texas is doing so well that you got to stick with the Republican establishment, even the corrupt Paxton and the inept Abbott, who can't seem to protect, you know, the—
the citizens from either, you know, storms or data centers. I mean, what is it you're telling voters? So without knowing that message, frankly, I'm not sure it's going to have much impact, even though it's a huge, huge amount of money.
What would be the message?
Hillary Clinton, you should become a canvasser.
You should become, you know, we should probably go out and knock on some doors. Kara, we could lose somebody's porch.
They would lose their minds if they saw you on a porch. Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, a deep dive into the big issue: affordability. Madam Secretary, we're back. Here's the number that should scare every politician on the ballot: almost half of registered voters say the cost of living is the single most important factor in how they'll vote this November.
That's not an unknown thing. Economy has always been the most important thing. It was critical dozens of years ago and everything else.
So talk a little bit about this in general.
Well, look, I think everybody knows that people are worried about paying for groceries, for rent, for gas and diesel, for the electric bill, for healthcare. I mean, it's really the whole challenge of the cost of living right now. And three out of four voters say their own costs are heading in the wrong direction. So that's what I think we need to focus on today.
