Morning Joe - Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging interview

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

September 10, 2026 - 8am: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging interview To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good morning, Joe. It's Thursday, September 10th. Joining the conversation we have, former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. It is so good to see you again. Thank you for coming on the show this morning. We have a lot to talk with you about. We're going to get to the midterms, the war in Iran. But we want to talk about 25 years since the attacks on America on 9-11. And you've written about what you've learned about the aftermath of 9-11, sort of a different part. part of the story that you say is still coming into focus now. Right. Well, there are a lot of lessons that I think we still have to learn from what happened 25 years ago in the aftermath. But among them is what happened when our own government lied to people about the air quality in the area. And I was the senator from New York along with Chuck Schumer.

and we were actually down at Ground Zero the day after. We had been flown to go. We were the only civilian plane in the air, and we landed at LaGuardia, and we got into a helicopter. We circled Ground Zero, which was still, to me, the most emotionally vivid, horrific view

of anything I've ever seen, like Dante's hell. landed, met up with Governor Bataki and then Mayor Giuliani and went walking toward Ground Zero. And as we got closer, it was like a literal black stage curtain had been put across the entire area. And occasionally you would see like a foot and a hand and an axe as a firefighter would come through it. I mean, just everything that was in the air was so visible. It wasn't just what we were feeling in the back of our throats and our noses, but it was surrounding us. So when there was so much to worry about and so many things we had to deal with, but it just struck me that it couldn't be safe to be breathing that.

And I began asking questions and kept being told by official sources that, no, it was fine. And so part of what I learned is that, you know, the job of being a public official in a crisis is to keep digging for as much information as possible. And so I was fortunate enough to put together a Senate hearing. It was the first time we began to get, you know, real data. You know, the doctor, Dr. Kelly from the fire department, we kept talking about the Trade Center cough that the firefighters. had. And a woman, a woman named Liz Berger, I start the article talking about her, she lived there. And she had children. And she said, you know, five men in hazmat suits came to clean my apartment. How can it be safe for us to live here? And she kept being told that it was. And look, there were all

these competing challenges. You know, everybody wanted to get Wall Street open. Everybody wanted to get, quote, back to normal. But you ought to be able to do more than one thing. at a time. And to lie about the air in order to get people back downtown, to get Wall Street up and going, which was important, there ought to be a smarter, more honest way of going about that. And now, of course, we have all these documents coming out about the city. So, you know, for me, there were so many lessons, but tell the truth. I mean, maybe you have to explain it in a way that might not cover everything, but at least say to people, you know, maybe you shouldn't go back right away. Maybe you should wear masks. Maybe you shouldn't be there for more than an hour

or two. Tell people the truth to the best of your ability. It seemed obvious, and why they kept lying was beyond me. Mika tells the story of running down from 57th Street as a CBS News reporter getting down there. And she's down there for, what, three, four weeks? Five weeks. Five weeks. The first day she was there, she wrapped something around her. Her, her. she had a makeshift face mask because it was so obvious to her that this was dangerous. But you talk about not learning lessons. You look at Donald Trump and COVID. And Donald Trump telling Bob Woodward after, it's on tape.

Basically, I lied about COVID because I wanted the economy to reopen up. Well, that is exactly the lesson we did not learn. And, you know, look, this. This president is the Olympic champion of lying. He lies about everything. He lies just for the sake of lying. But when it affects people's health, when it affects their pocketbook, when it affects our, you know, soldiers and our air force and our Marines and our sailors and everybody in the Middle East, when it's just lying that puts people's lives at risks or makes life so much harder, that is something that the American people should not tolerate. And, you know, I also listened to your first segment about artificial intelligence.

And I just wanted to underscore when the 9-11 commission came out with its report, the most dramatic statement was that it was a failure of imagination. That is what we're facing with AI. The alarm bells are sounding. People from within the industry. I mean, you know, I can't pretend to know enough about it to be very, you know, fluid in my discussion. But I know enough to listen to people who know things. And by the way, people who you disagree with, people I disagree with. 100%.

If Elon Musk is saying this could end humanity, he's been giving this one since 2014, yeah. People on the inside at Open AI and Anthropic, you know, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the creators. I mean, all of these people are. What did Jeffrey Hinton say 20% chance of? Extinction. Yes. 20% chance. So let's learn the lesson of 9-11. There was a failure of imagination. People could not imagine that a bunch of guys would go learn how to fly and fly commercial airliners into buildings. And now we're facing the same thing. And we faced it during COVID.

There was a failure of imagination, a failure of honesty. Now we are facing it with artificial intelligence. And why are we doing this again? Why are we letting ourselves be, you know, just walled into inaction because we can't figure out how to bring people together? Right. There are enough distinguished Americans who have been sounding the alarm. You know, Hank Paulson and Bob Rubin just wrote an article. They said, look, we've dealt with financial crises, but what's happening with AI dwarfs that. Yeah.

We could get people who know a lot and enough to know how to translate what they're hearing from the scientists and others to say, here's what we should do. should be on warp speed. I'm glad you mentioned warp speed because the one good thing that Donald Trump did in his first term was warp speed. And he won't take credit for it because he wants to listen to the crazies who don't want to talk about, you know, how effective the vaccine was in saving people's lives. So let's put an AI commission on warp speed and figure out what we're going to do to sensibly regulate. And what I'm hearing from, you know, the leaders, you know, Sam and Dario and others is they're basically saying stop us before something really bad happens. I can't stop myself because I'm not sure he's going to stop. And I'm not sure those guys over in China are going to stop.

That's the issue. Help us stop. The president of China is coming to the White House. In two weeks. In two weeks. There should be a concerted effort by this government to get off of the lies, get off of social media, quit worrying about ballrooms and ridiculous arches, and come up with a plan to enlist the Chinese. The Chinese have their own issues. They need control in order to stay in power. So they may have a different view than we do about regulation, but they can't let this thing go on without having it rained in. I'm so glad you said that, because anytime I talk to a leader in Silicon Valley, they go, ah, but China.

But China, they're going to go, race light years. He said, really the same China that doesn't even allow their tech sector to go without arresting their most powerful. But no, the idea that she is going to say, please, a thousand flowers bloom and take my government down from like, no, that's not going to happen. That's right. And have your bots challenge our control over everything that goes on in our country? There is a very clear self-interest, national interest for Xi to work with Trump, if we could get Trump focused for more than a nanosecond on trying to figure out how not to make money himself from this, but bring people together to try to come up with the right level of regulation. So let me ask you about the wars that came out of 9-11. There was Iraq.

There was Afghanistan. I think the first, second, third sort of brush of history was. would suggest that both of those were disasters. That said, history in 20 years does funny things. The Iraq War, you know, we had Richard Engel on the 20th anniversary tearing up. Richard, who was very critical in the Bush administration saying, yes, there were terrible mistakes. And yet behind me, I've got a group of students that are debating whether the war was a good thing

or not. He said 20 years ago, they would have all been shot for even talking about it. Right. So we have that in Iraq. And again, a war that made Iran more powerful, but at the same time, a war that took Saddam Hussein out of the Middle East. Afghanistan is far more difficult because it seemed like the better cause, the better war. You look at how women were being treated. And then the freedoms that they were given, the freedoms Afghan were given.

and now look where we are in 2026. Talk about the lessons of that. The wars that followed, what did we do right? What did we do wrong? What would you do differently if you could? That's like, you know, an all-day discussion. That's, by the way, that's your three-volume book. That's coming next.

You know, I teach at Columbia, and I teach a course called Inside the Situation Room. And the dean and I were on your show when we published a textbook. called Inside the Situation Room. And we look at crisis decision-making, and yesterday we had two panels about 9-11. And the first one were two former officials from the Bush administration, Matt Waxman and Michael Chertoff, and Jane Harmon, who was at the time the head of the Intel Committee. The first decision that was made was very consequential. And, you know, Michael Chertoff talked about it.

What was this thing that just happened to us? was it the biggest crime in the history of our country or was it a war? And the conclusion was to treat it as a war. And it became labeled as the war on terror. And it was treated as a war because treating it as a crime would have been really difficult to, you know, track down people, make connections and all the rest of it. So we were on a war footing as of the day, you know, the day after 9-11. that set a certain mentality in place. And I totally understand that and why that happened.

And then with Afghanistan, you know, this was a decision that I think had to be made to go in and to try to track down not only bin Laden but other al-Qaeda operatives. And the Taliban had, as you remember, the opportunity to turn them over. And they wouldn't for all the reasons having to do with their culture and having fought with them during, you know, the 80s against the Soviets and all of that. So Afghanistan morphed into something much bigger. But I think it also represented an effort, first by the Bush administration, then by the Obama administration, which, as you know, I was a part of, to try to do not only the counterterrorism mission that was the primary. goal. But to see what we could do to try to create a more stable nation so that we wouldn't face any more problems coming out of it, you know, because we'd already seen what they've done with the Soviets and it goes way back to the 19th century, but to going forward. Iraq was different.

And Iraq, you know, on the panel yesterday, both Jane Harmon and I said, you know, we voted for it for reasons that we thought were rooted in, in my case, coercive diplomacy. I thought that the vote would be used to try to really force Saddam Hussein to come clean about whatever was there. And there were still, as you remember, UN weapons inspectors and others who were trying to get to the bottom. By the way, in 1992, people forget this. In 1992, actually his son-in-law defected and said he's developing a nuclear weapon. Well, and remember, the Israelis bombed a nuclear reactor. Right. In the 80s ship. It wasn't, it wasn't at all unfair for people. like Jane and me, to think that there was something that had to be rooted out.

But to root it out in a smart way, not an invasion that wasn't well enough planned, so we didn't know what would happen after, you know, we got there. So there should be a lot of lessons, you know, learned from both the Afghan and the Iraq experience. But at the same time, you know, you have to ask yourself, well, you know, where are we today? we are the ones that are strengthening Iran. Have we not learned anything from what we've done for the last 25 years? And Iran, I think with the, not just encouragement, but with the assistance of both China and Russia, is playing a very clever game of diminishing our capacity to defend ourselves and our allies. You know, when Iran launches missiles and drones that we use Patriot interceptors to stop, they're going to keep doing that because we're running out of them.

We should be sending them to Ukraine, but we are being depleted and we have to look at our potential dangers, especially what she is thinking. You know, they can't defend anybody anymore because they don't have the capacity to defend. Maybe we can coerce Taiwan and are just giving up because there's not going to be any support. I mean, if you look at the world map right now, it is not favorable to the United States. And in large measure, I would argue that's because of very wrongheaded decisions that are being made by this administration. And, Secretary, there was no case made to the public. You're talking about the case that was made for the Iraq War. We learned later some of it under false pretenses.

but we woke up one Sunday morning, and President Trump was standing there saying, we have attacked Iran. We want regime change. The people need to rise up. We've got to get rid of their nuclear program, which they told us they had obliterated a year earlier. We want to decaditate their government, their military,

all these things. He's talking last night at that event in Dallas, again, about the nuclear program. From where you sit, and we are where we are now seven months since the start of the war, what is the best possible outcome? What should be the objective for the United States? Well, we are in a real pickle.

That's a diplomatic program. And I think our best outcome right now is to, you know, be very focused trying to get back allies in both Europe and in China to help us pressure Iran to get the Strait of Hormuz open. And then I think we have to give, you know, space for Trump to say, I got the straight of Hormuz. It was open before, but okay, he got the straight open. You know, traffic is going through it. Oil prices will come down. We're going to, you know, step back and see how this develops. That's the only thing I can see that can give us anything resembling an out right now. And that doesn't seem to be where he's headed because he's not really negotiating. And, you know, look, the people he sends to negotiate, the signals that, you know, he himself,

sends, you know, Iran is not going to respond to that. And we just had the International Atomic Energy Agency for the first time saying that Iran is concealing, you know, nuclear activities. That didn't happen under Bush, Obama, First Trump, Biden. It's happening now. And so there is, we have set ourselves back, which seems so tragic because Iran was on the back foot. And there were a lot of pressures that could have been applied to Iran through sanctions and other activities that he totally bypassed to make an incredibly ill-advised attack on Iran that he didn't know what he was doing or how he was going to get out of. So, Lamar, hold that thought. We have much more on the war with Iran, the implications, the consequences. Also want to

talk about the upcoming midterm elections with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We'll be back after a short break. Oil would be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran, which is taking place right now. We'll win it. We're winning it. I would advise Iran not to get cute because we will have to hit them very hard. We have no choice, right? We have no choice.

Does anybody here think that Iran should have a nuclear weapon? Anybody? Who feels Iran should not have a nuclear weapon? You know, it happens to me all the time. Guys come up. You know, I wish you didn't do the war in Iran. Gasolines up, blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, let me ask you just smart people.

Let me ask you, not too many of them, by the way. Let me ask you one question. Can Iran have a nuclear weapon? Absolutely not. Well, then I'm right that I win. Yeah. President Trump speaking at that RNC midterm convention event last night in Dallas. Jonathan Lemire, he's talking as though the nuclear program in Iran

is a new problem that wasn't addressed by many administrations before his, including within Iran, deal that he ripped away that was addressing everything he's talking about that. Yeah, he keeps changing the goalposts on this, on this conflict. And as we acknowledge yesterday and some remarks to reporters before that extravaganza in Dallas, that he thinks Iran will stay through the fight beyond the American elections and potentially even years to come. So Secretary Clinton, that, of course, event last night meant to boost or bolster Republican chances in the midterms. We've never seen a midterm convention like this. But let's talk about the upcoming elections.

And in particular, something we discuss on the show all the time. I mean, Democrats certainly seem to have the wind of their backs. Polls are looking good. But there's sort of this unease about Election Day. We've seen the Trump administration try to crack down on mail-in voting. We had the Homeland Security Secretary this week not rule out the idea that ICE agents could be around polling places on election day. What is your level of concern that these elections will be conducted freely and fairly? And that if they don't go Donald Trump's party's way, that they'll honor the results.

You know, I thought the whole Republican mini-convention and Trump's speech was, you know, making the case to the Democrats. I think it actually helps us for people to see the contrast between, you know, what Trump is offering and what his administration has produced and potential for change. But I do take seriously the unfortunate attitude that Trump and his part, party have that they couldn't win a fair election in these midterms. So they're going to try to prevent mail-in ballots from being sent to people. They're going to try to intimidate people from going to the polls. They're going to be threatening people. And unfortunately, they may well show up in certain places in order to demonstrate a kind of chilling effect on voters. You know, we ran a simulation last month about what you do in that event. You know, we ran a simulation last month,

know, when you have interference on election day, when you have interference with, you know, counting the votes and certifying the winners afterwards. And people are trying to get as prepared as possible. States are election officials, attorneys general, advocates and organizers. So we're trying to be as ready as we can, Jonathan, to counter whatever they decide to do. But I am very confident we're going to take back the House. And I'm increasingly confident we're going to take the Senate. Because I think the American people, even people, even people, who wanted to give Trump a chance, even people who voted for Trump, they didn't vote for what's happening now. And I think they want to, you know, have the country take a deep breath and put

some big check and balances on Trump for his last two years. Because left to his own devices, given everything he has done, getting us into war, you know, the kind of deals that, you know, his family and other families are making with dictators and, you know, not resolving wars, but instead, you know, leaving them to fester to continue to benefit themselves. I mean, everything that's going on abroad plus the affordability crises here in our own country. I saw Jason Crowe talking about that. I saw Dan Osborne talking about that earlier on this show. These are real events in people's lives.

It doesn't matter. You know, you can put a lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. And I think a lot of voters are saying, I don't believe this anymore. You know, he still has his hard, what, 30 percent that are going to, you know, follow him, you know, literally anywhere. But the vast majority of Americans, particularly independent, swing voters, I think they're done. And they want to check the power that this person in our, you know, Oval Office is trying to wield to an extent never before seen in American history. You know, every four years or so Republicans find a new boogeyman to go after. And 2004.

Oh, I know that very well. You know better than anybody else. I'm pretty good memory about that. I'm curious. Do you think anybody has had more money spent against her as far as negative branding than you? I have no idea. I mean, I can't, I can't, you know, you're Nancy Pelosi's name a lot, but you may be at the top there. So, but in 2004, you know, they used gay marriage on all of the, on as many ballots as they could get gay marriage on.

Of course, it's been trans athletes for the past decade. And Tala RICO certainly answered that well yesterday. Now it's a DSA. Oh, right. Now wherever I go, it's like, you know, you're guys, well, just kind of like me going, well, yeah, he's crazy. But look at the other side. They're communists. They're socialists.

Of course, they don't talk about Trump. And they have like this much power. And they're like a handful of people compared to the unchecked power on the other side. Explain. I mean, I try to explain to these people. It's always been this way. I mean, you've always had, like, in New York, some people to the fore-far-law. I worked with Jose Serrano from the South Bronx.

He'd go visit Castro. There's nothing new under this time. Nothing. Could you, I mean, is this going to work? Are people going to keep voting against their economic self-interest? Well, I hope not. I mean, every other word out of Trump's mouth is socialist or communist. So, you know, they're doing everything they can to throw the mud.

But again, he's the one that's taken over 30 companies. Yeah. Well, he's the one who has socialism for the rich and socialism, you know, for families' interests. So look, from my perspective, everybody has to run their own campaign. And I will say that, you know, some of the language and some of the positions, you know, on the far left go way too far. But on the other hand, we do have a housing crisis. We have a health care crisis. So what I have said, and I, you know, did.

an event a couple, you know, two weeks ago with Hakeem Jeffries. And what I said is once we take the House and we have a very big, diverse caucus, let people get to work, Joe. If you want to introduce Medicare for All, write the bill. If you want to restore Affordable Care Act subsidies, write the bill. Let's get back to actually doing the work of legislating and making a difference. Let's move from slogans to actual... results. I am all for that. And I think it would be great to have a vigorous debate. Let people defend the positions they've taken. And I think that would be good for the Democratic Party. It would be good for the country. So if people are further to my left or your left, that's much

easier to be. If, you know, then let them do the work and let them get out of the sloganeering and into the legislating and results-oriented impact. So, and as we talk about the DSA, we have to talk about Israel right now and the DSA and the hostility the DSA has towards Israel. Obviously, I know you. But remember, there are people on the far right of the Republican Party who are just as hostile. Well, of course. You know? Of course.

I mean, think about it, because we've got literal neo-Nazis on the far right. So let's balance off whatever is said on the far left with what's said on the far right. But let me finish. I've sensed a frustration with you. Yes. And the president, when people are screaming that you've always been against the Palestinians, that you've never fought for the Palestinians. I remember very early on you talking about a two-state solution when that was like radical.

Yeah, I was the first person in any public role. You were the first person. And I do remember when you said two-state solution. That was radical in Washington. And then Oslo Accords. Of course, I got in trouble with Dr. Prisinski. He called me stunningly superficial when I said the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians just about everything they could have asked for a capital in East Jerusalem.

97% of the West Bank, the 3% would be given by, you know, they could pick any 3% of land in Israel. Right. Explain about all you have done to fight for Palestine. No, this is critical because this is like a memory. People have no. They don't know any history. And I've had these conversations, you know, look, because I teach at Columbia and for, you know, two years following October 7th, we had a lot of very intense conversation. The bottom line for me is that, you know, we've done a, we did a lot over many years to try to resolve this very difficult situation.

And you're 100% right when Bill convinced. convinced Ahud Barak to make that offer for a Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat. And you should read my husband's account of it in his book, Citizen, because it's heartbreaking. He had every assurance from Arafat that he was eventually going to take the deal. And at the very end of Bill's administration, Arafat walked away. Why? I think, you know, we talk about that a lot. I think two things.

I think, one, it wasn't everything. So the people who wanted everything, like total right of return, for example, and all of that, you know, they were not going to be satisfied. And there would be internal opposition. And I don't think he felt up to the challenge of dealing with that. And he was afraid he'd be killed. By Hamas, just like Sadat. Yeah, he saw Sadat killed.

He saw Rabin, whom he truly respected assassinated. And so I, and then like a month later, he calls Bill after George W. Bush is president. He says, I'll take the deal now. And Bill goes, well, congratulations. You know, I'm not president. But we never stopped. And, you know, when, you know, when Bill was asked to come see the Saudi king Abdullah, Abdullah said, I want to apologize to you.

I want you to forgive me. I could have made him take that deal. But I was talked out of him. of it. So then when I become Secretary of State, we negotiate a settlement freeze. I negotiated it. I had a press conference with Vintyahu at midnight in Jerusalem. It was the only time there were no settlement. Settlements built during that freeze. We had a 10-month freeze, and I couldn't get the Palestinians in until the ninth month. Because they could not figure out how to take advantage of this opportunity like they couldn't figure out how to take advantage of a state that would have been

in existence now for 25 years. What is a problem on leadership side with the Palestinians as opposed to what you all were able to do in Northern Ireland where you got hardened, tough terrorist? I mean, I interviewed a few of them. Right, right. And they still kind of gave me chills. They're tough guys. Well, you knew when you were shaking hands with them, these were murderers.

Right. But you got them to the table. You're not going to make peace with your friends. You've got to make peace with the guys who have guns. And you've got to get everybody at the table. So what separated the Middle East from Northern Ireland? Well, I think, well, look, we got to the brink of a state and we couldn't get across the line. Then, you know, Sharon pulls out of Gaza, which was a dramatic change.

and the militants, primarily Hamas, took over Gaza. And they weren't interested in building an economy and building a state. They were interested in continuing to wage war in any way they could against, you know, Israel. I mean, I negotiated a ceasefire in, I think it was, I don't remember, 2011 or 2012, between, you know, Hamas and Israel, because they'd been firing rockets and a few people had died. And Nanyahu, who was still there, was talking about going in a ground invasion. So I flew in, you know, went to the Israelis, the Palestinians, and then ended up in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood president at the time, Morsi, to negotiate a ceasefire. So this requires constant attention.

And, you know, it also requires the United States to exercise tough love. You know, not rejection and not total agreement. And look, I have said repeatedly, I love Israel and I hate Nanyahu's government and his policies. I love America and I hate Trump's government and policies. I think it's bad in the first case for Israel what's happening. And I think it's really bad for the United States what's happening. So I think we've got to be very clear the message as we send. And hopefully the Israeli people, especially after this bombshell that came out in the Israeli press,

where Nanyahu had been literally called by, you know, Sheikh Mohammed, Mbz from UAE, and warned that Hamas was planning something. And either he didn't believe it or he, it's horrible to say. He wanted to see what they could plan so that then he could come down hard and it would enhance his position. I don't know what his thinking was. But the bottom line, talk about a failure of imagination. This was a failure of leadership. This was a failure of, you know, protecting the people of Israel.

He'd been told what was going to happen. So if the Israelis want to vote for that again, then I think the United States has to take a very tough position. I think we could work with a new government. And I did an interview with Mike Frommon a week or so ago. He said, well, does it really make a difference if Netanyahu leaves? I said, yeah, I think it really does make a difference. And, of course, it depends on who's in the coalition. He said, well, give me one example.

I said, well, I would hope that a new prime minister would crack down on settler violence in the West Bank. There should be no impunity for that kind of violence. It is not just about the death and destruction of the Palestinians, their property, and all the rest of it. Anytime you let people have that level of violence in a society that you don't stop, that creeps into the whole society. So it's unfair, bad, and wrong for the Palestinians, and it's also very dangerous Israel. So, yeah, I think let's see what they vote for and see whether we can't, you know, figure out how to have a new approach with a new government. I'm going to ask you, Secretary, a big picture question about the country.

A lot of us have kids who've grown up only in this Trump era of politics. I have teenagers, and I tell them all the time, this is not the way it's supposed to be. It's not the way it has been in the past. And my hope for you is that it won't be the same. way in the future. We can go down the list. You're supposed to have a Congress that checks the president. You're supposed to have a Department of Justice that's independent. Your personal attorney should not be the Attorney General of the United States, all these things. And since you were at the leading edge in 2015 and 16, of course, of this era, how do we, when Donald Trump

leaves office on January 20th, 20, 29, whoever is the president, maybe it's J.D. Vance, maybe it's a Democrat. How do we, as a country, and I mean this together, not as a partisan question, how do we begin to sort of put the pieces back together? And again, another big question that's going to take three hours to answer. But what are your thoughts on that? You know, I've thought a lot about it because I have been, you know, visited by and had conversations with many of the people who potentially might run for president. And I don't know who will emerge.

I don't know who will be the nominee and hopefully who can win. But I think whoever that person is has to take the country on that journey, Willie. I think that person has to say, first and foremost, we've got to unite our country. We all have to be Americans again. It's more important to put country over party. And given the world in which we find ourselves, it is too dangerous for us to remain divided. That only gives aid and comfort to those who wish us ill from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing. And then I think that person has to do what successful politicians do today, which we didn't have to do back in the

old day. They have to tell that story on whatever social media exists in, you know, in two years. They have to really bring people into that conversation. And they have to say, look, it's kind of like a very ultra-modern version of, you know, FDR's fireside chats, where the next president, whoever that is, will say, today I want to talk to young people. You know, when I grew up, we revered our leaders. We didn't think of them primarily as members of a party, we thought of them as our president. And of course, there were differences. There have to be differences. We don't all agree. But we want to rebuild, you know, your faith in government. We want you to understand that here's how we take care of your grandmother with Social Security.

Here's how we take care of your dad who served in the military. We want to get back to taking care of each other again and to literally bring the country on that journey. We're not going to get it all fixed overnight. We have to fix a lot of what's been broken in the And we've got to make sure that, you know, our Congress does its work again. It has to start, you know, legislating and helping people and doing the hard work, not just, you know, arguing and yelling and finger pointing. I think if we can have a president who does that, I mean, you know, when I was a little girl, we had the presidential fitness contest.

And I've been around long enough to actually think that, you know, President Eisenhower was going to sit at his desk and sign my certificate. I did the run, I did the jump. I was going to get a certificate. Willie, was that before you told me? Oh, no, we had it. Reagan, John. I did Reagan, come in town.

Reagan signed a test. I mean, I really believed that President Eisenhower was thinking about me. So I think it is doable. It's really hard. I'm not, you know, unaware of how difficult it is. But if we get the right person elected, I think it's doable. But if we don't separate the hands. hate from the hope and we don't create space for people to talk to each other again and,

you know, breathe together and work together. Then I worry about my grandchildren just like you worry about your kids. So Secretary Clinton, that's sort of a big picture question. I'm with tomorrow being September 11th, I'm reminded that the only time that Article 5, the NATO charter was enacted was to help the United States after those terror attacks. And as Secretary of State, you still know the importance of alliances and we're seeing them strain now. Trade war with Canada, the trade war in Europe, the ventures on Greenland, you know, of leaving Europe to largely stand up with Ukraine alone. The list sort of goes on and on. President Biden was fond of telling a story that when he won that he said, you know, America's back. And French President Macron

said for how long. That has now been tested even more so because Trump's return. Do you think whoever the next president is, can these alliances actually be saved? Can America be trusted again? Well, the first question is, can they be saved? That's going to take a heck of a lot of work. I think it's doable. Can we be trusted again? We have to prove it, you know, prove it. Yeah. You know, and we have to get to the trust, but verify, and then get beyond it.

I think, Jonathan, that it is doable. Look, right now we're not a serious country. We're a dangerous country. We're causing all kinds of problems in the world. We're making ridiculous, you know, stands. We're picking fights with our best friends. We're threatening our best friends. we're giving passes to those who wish us ill.

I mean, we are not a serious country, and we don't have serious leadership. If we do again, I think we can actually make progress. I remember when, you know, then President-elect Obama was trying to persuade me to be Secretary of State. He said, look, I have a financial crisis, which is the worst since the Great Depression. And we have fractured a lot of our alliances because of Iraq and Afghanistan and the axis of evil and all of that. And he said, I can't do both. So I need to focus on the economy.

I want you to be Secretary of State and get on a plane and go around and try to start reassuring. And that was primarily in Asia. Boy did you ever. Well, you know, because. I did. And we needed to. And it wasn't enough to do a Zoom. We didn't have Zooms back then, but a video conference.

Send a facts. Yeah. You know, we had to show up. And we had to look people in the eye and say, you know, what can America do for you? How can America be your partner? How can we, you know, forge a better future? And we did it and we worked hard at it. And we also produced, you know, some positive results that were then torn up, whether it was, you know, the Iran nuclear deal, which wasn't perfect. I said it at the time. But by God, it was a great

foundation for then going after ballistic missiles and, you know, bad behavior in the neighborhood and all the rest of it. We had the Paris Accord. You know, climate change hasn't gone away just because, you know, Donald Trump wishes it. away. We actually did things. And part of the challenge now is to rebuild enough trust that we can start to work together. So if you look at Europe right now, Europe has to get its act together and it's very difficult for it to do so. And I think the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, Poland and others are right to be worried about Russia. I think they have every reason to be. If your father were here, he'd be sounding the alarm as loudly as he could.

And so they can't do this by themselves, in part because we have capabilities they don't. But we also provide the glue that gets everybody in that room to figure out how we can work together. So look, it's hard work. It's, you know, the hard boring of hard boards, as Max Weber used to say about politics. It's going to be hard. But if we get the right president, but we shouldn't wait until then. If we win the midterms, what I have urged is that. the House and the Senate begin to pass legislation and look for bipartisanship on a lot of legislation.

You know, I can't imagine that the Republican governors and senators and House members in our states that border Canada, and there are a bunch of them, are happy about what's going to happen to their economies. So there is the, you know, there are the seeds of bipartisanship. And I think a lot of members of Congress who, frankly, know better, but have been intimidated and gone along with Trump will be relieved. So the right leadership, in the Congress, the right leadership in the White House. It'll take time, but I think we can rebuild. Well, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this has been quite a conversation. Great to have your voice at this time. Her new piece, what the aftermath of 9-11 taught me,

is online now for the Atlantic. And I'm just thinking about the time you all spent with Gloria Steinem. Oh, my gosh, for raising that show. At 30-50, could you talk about her? And And just the beauty of her saying, I've learned a lot in life. But what I guess I've learned in my later years is the importance of laughter. Yeah. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to know her over a lot of years. And she was so wise, but she was funny.

She was a great friend. You know, after she passed away, I thought about how she was such a part of life. As a young woman, there wasn't, I'd never seen anybody like her. I mean, of course, she was beautiful in the aviator sunglasses, but she had a poise about her and a confidence that led her to say things that were really unprecedented about, you know, women's lives, women's rights, women's equality. You know, because look, there were schools I couldn't apply to, scholarships, jobs. I mean, all that was real, no credit cards. The whole thing that, you know, we, we lived through. And she played a major role, along with a lot of other, you know, very forward-looking

women and men who opened up a lot of doors. And yet she was, she was just so calm. And, you know, you'd go visit her in her living room and she'd just sit there and she would talk and then she'd kind of do a zinger or she'd ask a question. And I just, I'm just so grateful for her life and her leadership. She paved the way for all of us. Thank you so much for being on this month. morning. We appreciate it. Thank you all. And we'll be right back with much more morning, Joe. Our thanks again to Secretary Clinton for that wine-raging conversation. Tomorrow we will have special coverage of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks. We will remember what happened that day, the human tolls, the lives that were lost, how it has

changed our politics and our relationship to the world. We'll talk about my new piece. I wrote about my reflections about being down there that day and how the city and country have changed. Willie Geist will be at Ground Zero for live coverage. The rest of us will be here in studio to remember what happened that day. An extraordinarily dark day in our nation's history. But Unity came after it, unity that we've been searching for ever since. So again, we will have complete live special coverage tomorrow of the 25th anniversary of September 11th, including the memorial service that will occur there at Ground Zero.

and then later the day at Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So we hope you will tune in for that tomorrow at 6 a.m. Eastern. That does it for us this morning. Money, power, politics with Stephanie Rule is up next after a short final break. Thank you for watching.