MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews provided a laundry list of quotable utterances on Tuesday night that began right from the start when he likened the Clintons to “used cars” being “total[ed]” by Donald Trump by bringing up the Clinton’s checkered pasts and later when he compared Trump and Bernie Sanders to politicians in Third World countries.
In the show’s very first minute, Matthews covered Trump’s suggestion that the Clintons were behind the death of then-deputy counsel and friend Vince Foster in 1993 as the possibility of foul play were supposedly “very serious” and how Foster died were “very fishy.”
It was in the seconds before those highlights that Matthews dropped the car analogy with Bill and Hillary Clinton plus Trump: “For weeks, Donald Trump has been totaling the Clinton like a pair of used cars. Now, he's smashing them with an even harder suspicion that the death of Bill Clinton’s deputy counsel Vince Foster back in 1993 was not a suicide.”
Matthews continued on the Foster angle and while speaking to USA Today’s Susan Page, he lamented that Clinton will be unable to solve her unfavorability problem if she’s having to reassure voters that she’s “not a murderer”:
[C]learly, one of the problems Hillary Clinton faces now is the old likeability thing. I’m not pushing it. It’s just there, but if she’s there defending herself against the murder charge, it's very hard to have a charm offensive. How do you say — don’t you like me? I’m not a murderer.
Moving forward roughly nine minutes, Matthews promoted New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica’s latest piece on Bernie Sanders’s refusal to surrender to Hillary Clinton when Matthews let it slip that Clinton and the mainstream media think on the same wavelength: “I don't think he's [Sanders] operating in the same sort of world that Hillary Clinton and the objective journalists are.”
Going to the fourth and final piece of chicanery on the evening, the longtime MSNBC personality equated Trump and Sanders to presidential candidates from South Africa and Venezuela:
You're reading all this somewhere in Venezuela, they claim voter fraud. Somewhere in South Africa, they claim voter fraud. There's never an election where the loser doesn't say claim voter fraud and when they win they arrest the person who lost the election and throw them this jail where there’s Bhutto or whatever, they hang them. I mean, you listen to Trump and you listen to Bernie Sanders, it's beginning to sound like one of those what we used to call a Third World Countries[.]
Doing his best Sanders imitation, Matthews added that it’s hard to pinpoint the last time either one of them lost a primary and gave a concession speech along the lines of this: “I lost — I tried really hard we worked — I’ll do it in a Brooklyn accent. We really tried hard. We really tried hard. We lost by a billion votes. Why doesn't anybody do that anymore? We lost.”
The relevant portions of the transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on May 24 can be found below.
MSNBC’s Hardball
May 24, 2016
7:00 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Trash talk. Let's play Hardball. [HARDBALL OPENING SEQUENCE] Good evening. I’m Chris Matthews up in New York. For weeks, Donald Trump has been totaling the Clinton like a pair of used cars. Now, he's smashing them with an even harder suspicion that the death of Bill Clinton’s deputy counsel Vince Foster back in 1993 was not a suicide. In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump called theories about possible foul play in Foster’s death “very serious” and called the circumstances surrounding it “very fishy.”
(....)
7:11 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEWS: And let me follow up to your point because if you look at numbers that we came out with at NBC over the weekend — The Wall Street Journal poll and our poll, clearly one of the problems Hillary Clinton faces now is the old likeability thing. I’m not pushing it. It’s just there, but if she’s there defending herself against the murder charge, it's very hard to have a charm offensive. How do you say — don’t you like me? I’m not a murderer. I mean, it puts her in the backseat of an argument. Doesn’t it. I mean, how do you win that argument? I'm innocent but also I’m kind of likable.
SUSAN PAGE: You can't be in a discussion — you can’t be in a discussion about whether or not you murdered Vince Foster and make any progress in your presidential campaign. You have to put that aside and talk about your issues.
MATTHEWS: Michael’s laughing. I know. It's absurdity. Let’s all agree. It’s an absurdity. It’s an absurd charge. It’s a rotten charge, but there's something about Trump's ability to launch these grenades.
(....)
7:20 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEWS: Anyway, Mike, you were pretty critical of Sanders in your column today in the paper. You wrote, “Sanders stays in the race because his own rhetoric has become a narcotic for him; because he really has convinced himself he is the face and voice of the revolution. And if you’re running a revolution, it’s a little difficult to head back to the Green Mountains. To the end, Sanders really does act as if the scoreboard is some great big lie, even when the numbers are up there for everybody to see.” Mike, I don’t know. I agree with column. I don't think he's operating in the same sort of world that Hillary Clinton and the objective journalists are.
(....)
7:24 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEWS: Mike, you know when looking on the inside pages. They have a broadsheet where there’s like page 15, page 17 is foreign news, not just American political news. You're reading all this somewhere in Venezuela, they claim voter fraud. Somewhere in South Africa, they claim voter fraud. There's never an election where the loser doesn't say claim voter fraud and when they win they arrest the person who lost the election and throw them this jail where there’s Bhutto or whatever, they hang them. I mean, you listen to Trump and you listen to Bernie Sanders, it's beginning to sound like one of those what we used to call a Third World Countries and they talk like that. There’s no such thing as losing an election — when is the last time you heard a decent concession speech from Bernie Sanders or for Trump. An actual concession speech? I lost — I tried really hard we worked — I’ll do it in a Brooklyn accent. We really tried hard. We really tried hard. We lost by a billion votes. Why doesn't anybody do that anymore? We lost.
