It's great to see you, especially since the we've been
trying to process the results of this election.
You know, in the book you write that after your
wife Hillary's lost, when she lost to Donald Trump in
2016, you had an outburst of rage and.
And you didn't sleep for years, 2 years.
I me either.
I still can't sleep.
So you should call Joy.
Call me up.
So how are you sleeping now?
What's going to happen now?
I'm sleeping better now because I did everything I could.
Yeah, for the alternative, that's true.
But I also think it's important for everybody to just
take a deep breath and say, unlike in 2016, there
was no outside influence, like the FBI director interfering at
the last moment in violation of 70 years of policy.
And it changed 5% overnight.
In my lifetime, I've never seen a poll change 5%
overnight.
So anybody that says that he didn't get through the
election, you know, needs a some.
Yeah.
But this time, Donald Trump won the race fair and
square, I think.
What do you mean?
You think you know what I mean?
I mean, I'm not like him.
I have to have some evidence to make a charge.
So as far as I know, he won it and
there are a lot of reasons why.
But and look, I grew up in Trump country and
my native state, Arkansas moved is far to the right
from 2008 through 2016 in any country, any state in
the country.
And they had these great little, the Trump people had
these great little Facebook clubs that had answers to what
all our friends were saying to them in the campaigns.
So these are hard fought campaigns and the people on
both sides care a lot about politics.
And there's a lot more of this going on in
rural America than you may think, where people are very
discussing these issues in a very sophisticated way and why
they look at it the way they do.
So I think what we have to do is to
observe a peaceful transfer of power, stand up for what
we believe and work together when we can.
I do not think we should just be jamming them,
even though we don't know they do that to us
a lot.
I think it's a mistake.
Well, Mr.
President, I want to ask you, Donald Trump was in
part elected this time around by getting some of your
original base, the base that propelled you to win victory
twice was working class voters, very much the backbone bone
of America.
And over the last 20 years, we've seen a lot
of those shift to the Republican side.
What do you attribute this to and what do Democrats
need to do to try to get the working class
coalition back?
Well, I think part of it is cultural.
That is all over the world.
People that live in rural areas are more conservative.
I remember, I'll never forget when I got out of
office, the Chinese government asked my foundation to come work
on AIDS and they said, look, the Chinese people still
like you.
You came here and you made an outreach to us
and, and the rural people are scared of AIDS.
So we want you to go out there where the
rates are high and be televised, playing with kids on
the floor, eating dinner with their parents, doing these things
and give them a chance to adjust to this.
So I said, OK, I'll try.
And there's a lot of that here.
And I see it every time I go home.
You know, we just went back to Arkansas because we
had the 20th anniversary of the opening of my library.
And the people that were with me 32 years ago
when I started can't believe that they're still there.
Yeah.
But the world moves on.
And things that once made sense to people don't anymore.
And things that should make sense don't anymore.
And there's.
We need to quit screaming at each other and listen
to each other.
Yeah, we need to have a serious conversation about these
things.
And I think one of the things that Democrats sometimes
do is give up on too many people because the
demographics say they're not going to be for us.
Well, that may be, but you know, if you don't
deal with something that's controversial just because you don't want
to hear it, that's like an insult to voters.
Yeah, right.
Agree.
You know what?
And I think I tell her this is my pink
elephant in the living room story.
If Whoopi and I have been friends for years.
So suppose Whoopi goes and redoes her living room and
I get invited to come see it and I know
it's going to be nice.
And I walk in and sure enough, it's really pretty,
except that in the corner there's a beautiful round couch.
And standing behind the couch is a pink elephant.
Now, if I stay there with her for two hours
and I drink her coffee and maybe we'll have something
else to drink and and we have a good time,
but I never mentioned a pink elephant.
What's going to happen when I walk out of the
room?
She's going to think, I thought that guy was my
friend.
I thought he cared about me.
If he had really cared about me, we'd have talked
about why in the living daylights.
I got this pink elephant in the room, right?
I like the sound of the pink elephant.
I'm telling you, this is a big problem for people
who aren't comfortable with these kind of conversations.
And we're always going to have differences, and we are
very narrowly divided now on many things.
But I think you shouldn't run away from the tough
ones.
You should turn into them.
And I think it will help bring us back together.
I may be wrong, but that's what I think.