Ellen DeGeneres is an unabashed Hillary Clinton fan. And the daytime television host made no attempts to hide her love when the former Secretary of State visited her show for the second time in four months this week.
“I think it still is hard being a woman running for president,” Clinton told DeGeneres, who quickly agreed. “If you’re forceful, you’re too forceful. If you’re not forceful, you’re not tough enough.” The Democratic candidate described interactions she has had on the campaign trail where men have told her they never thought they could support a woman for president until she came along. “That’s a big step forward,” she said.
“You know what a supporter I am,” DeGeneres told her guest on Monday’s show. “I think you are smart as can be, you are qualified. I think you stand for everything that I want in a president.” In this time of great “fear,” DeGeneres said she views Clinton as the one who can “reassure” America that we are going to be OK.
“I know people are scared,” Clinton replied, citing the epidemic of gun violence as a prime reason. “When you send your first-grader to school, you don’t expect to lose that child in a mass murder,” she added, noting how “proud” she was of President Obama’s recent executive action on guns. Clinton stressed the notion that “we’re all in this together,” attempting to play down the Democrat vs. Republican divide, looking past her primary fight with Bernie Sanders to toward the general election.
The rest of DeGeneres’s interview with Clinton took on an expectedly lighter tone, with the candidate reacting to Kate McKinnon’s uncanny impression of her on Saturday Night Live. “It is truly an out-of-body experience,” Clinton said of her appearance on the show last fall. “When I see her doing me, I say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me,’ and then I’m within inches of her, and some of it’s off, but some of it’s a little too close for comfort.”
And of course, Clinton took yet another opportunity to lament the rise of “selfie” culture with the woman behind the most popular selfie of all time. She marveled at Kim Kardashian’s custom selfie light that “makes everybody look better” but also argued that the obsession with selfies on the campaign trail has cut down on the actual, substantive conversations with voters she experienced to a greater degree in 2008.
“There’s something so personal about running for president," she said, echoing comments she made about the “tyranny of the selfie” in a new interview with Esquire this month. “I’ll shake hands with somebody and they’ll say, ‘You know I want to tell you about,’ and then they’ll tell me about their child with addiction problems, their parent with Alzheimer’s. They will really share that moment. That has diminished greatly because of the selfie.”
The last time Clinton was on DeGeneres’s show, back in September, she was joined by surprise guest Amy Schumer, who emerged on roller skates to publicly endorse the candidate. This time, it was Scandal’s President Fitzgerald Grant, Tony Goldwyn, who showed up to play a game of “Heads Up!” with the pair.
Instead of being forced to do the “Whip/Nae Nae” as she did last fall, Clinton did jumping jacks and played patty cake with DeGeneres to the audience’s ecstatic delight.