Anyone with a pulse recognizes that President Trump has a preoccupation with his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, taking every conceivable opportunity to remind people of his superiority to Hillary Clinton.
At an event on Tuesday, Trump referenced his vanquished opponent—though not by name—while praising the state of Arkansas saying “How did I win Arkansas by so much when she came from Arkansas? I don’t know.”
However, the White House, specifically counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, who attended the event, has tried to make the case recently that no one talks about her.
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“We don’t care about her. Nobody here talks about her,” Conway said in a CNN interview on last Wednesday night. “Nobody here talks about Hillary Clinton, I promise you.”
Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly for the president himself, who uses his personal Twitter feed to bash his former opponent with surprising regularity. President Trump also frequently invokes her name at campaign rallies, interviews and speeches at the White House.
Using the database Factbase, a resource that compiles speeches, interviews, transcripts and tweets, The Daily Beast determined that Trump has mentioned the words “Hillary” or “Clinton” at least 229 times since taking office.
Additionally, he’s made 26 mentions of the phrase “Crooked Hillary” in his rhetoric and tweets.
Before today’s remarks, the most recent mentions include an early morning tweet on Thursday in which the president said: “Disproven and paid for by Democrats “Dossier used to spy on Trump Campaign. Did FBI use Intel tool to influence the Election?” @foxandfriends Did Dems or Clinton also pay Russians? Where are hidden and smashed DNC servers? Where are Crooked Hillary Emails? What a mess!”
He also mentioned Hillary Clinton during a press conference at the White House the very same day Conway said no one there discusses the former secretary of state.
“There is no collusion,” Trump said at the press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. “And when you talk about interviews, Hillary Clinton had an interview where she wasn’t sworn in. She wasn’t given the oath. They didn’t take notes. They didn’t record. And it was done on the Fourth of July weekend. That is perhaps ridiculous, and a lot of people looked upon that as being a very serious breach. And it really was.”
The president has deployed “Crooked Hillary,” a favorite phrase of his, on Twitter in the last few days and in a recent interview with The New York Times at Mar-a-Lago where he bragged about winning the state of West Virginia by “43 points against crooked Hillary Clinton.”
It has been 434 days since the presidential election.
