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Clinton calls Trump the ‘King of Debt’
By Marc Kovac
COLUMBUS
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lashed out at her likely Republican opponent, painting a picture of Donald Trump as a thin-skinned, bankruptcy-prone businessman more interested in lining his own pockets than in what is best for the country.
She called Trump reckless, careless and the “King of Debt.”
“He’s written a lot of books about business. They all seem to end in Chapter 11,” Clinton joked. “And over the years, he intentionally ran up huge amounts of debt on his companies and then he defaulted. He bankrupted his companies not once, not twice, but four times. Hundreds of people lost their jobs. Shareholders were wiped out. Contractors, many of them small businesses, took heavy losses. Many went bust. But Donald Trump, he came out fine.”
During an address Tuesday in Ohio’s capital city that focused on economic policy, Clinton contrasted her ideas for lowering the national debt and bolstering the national economy with comments made by Trump.
“He makes over-the-top promises that if people stick with him, trust him, listen to him, put their faith in him, he’ll deliver for them,” Clinton said. “He’ll make them wildly successful. And then everything falls apart, and people get hurt. Those promises you’re hearing from him at his campaign rallies? They are the same promises he made to his customers at Trump University, and now they’re suing him for fraud.”
She added, “The same people he’s trying to get to vote for him now are people he’s been exploiting for years, because it’s not just other investors, other rich people, that he took advantage of. It was working people.”
Clinton spoke for about 45 minutes before several hundred supporters at a Columbus school career center, with the event’s stage set up in an auto shop.
The midday speech set off a flurry of emails from Trump’s campaign spotlighting what the presumptive Republican nominee called a “catastrophic economic record under Clinton-Obama policies.”
On economic policy, Trump’s campaign noted, “While the Obama-Clinton economy has produced wages for many workers lower than 1970s wages and produced a record 94 million people outside the labor force, Donald Trump has proposed a series of reforms that will create trillions in wealth for our workers.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges also issued statements critical of Clinton’s economic record.
“The closest Hillary Clinton has come to business success was putting her office at the State Department up for sale to foreign donors and special interests,” Priebus said.
Borges added, “Hillary Clinton has promised to do two things that will worsen our economy: increase spending and increase taxes. It’s no surprise Ohio voters don’t trust her to create jobs.”