Hillary Clinton has excoriated US President Donald Trump for his treatment of the media, saying that press rights and free speech are "under open assault" by his administration, which she compared to an authoritarian regime.
"We are living through an all-out war on truth, facts and reason," Clinton said at a speech in New York. "When leaders deny things we can see with our own eyes, like the size of a crowd at the inauguration, when they refuse to accept settled science when it comes to urgent challenges like climate change ... it is the beginning of the end of freedom, and that is not hyperbole. It's what authoritarian regimes through history have done."
Clinton began by discussing threats to press freedom and free speech around the globe but soon turned to the United States under Trump, saying that such freedoms are "in the most perilous position I've seen in my lifetime."
"Today we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy," she said of her 2016 opponent. "Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Clinton's remarks were followed by an onstage conversation with Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The former secretary of state was asked if she had "hit back" enough during the campaign - a reference to a childhood episode in which, Clinton has written, her mother gave her permission to hit back at a bully.
"I now think that I didn't," Clinton said. She described the much-discussed moment when Trump was "stalking me on that debate stage."
She recalled thinking, "What do I do? Do I turn around and say, 'Back up, you creep?"' But then, she said, "the coverage would have been, 'She can't take the pressure, she got angry."' And so, she said she told herself, "You just have to be calm and in control. Because ultimately what the country wants is someone who is not blowing up in the Oval Office."
"Well, you know that did not work out so well," she said, to laughter in the audience.
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