Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump "was taking from America with both hands"
In her first remarks on the issue, Hillary Clinton slammed Donald Trump over revelations by the New York Times that he declared nearly a billion-dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns.
“Back in the 1990s, Trump apparently lost a billion dollars in a single year on bad investments and failing casinos,” she told the Toledo, Ohio crowd of roughly a thousand. “Now, how anybody can lose a dollar -- much less a billion dollars -- in the casino industry is kind of beyond me. Right? It’s just hard to figure.”
She continued, “But as a result, it doesn’t look like he paid a dime of federal income tax for almost two decades.”
His campaign, Clinton noted, has been arguing he’s “a genius” in response to the Times story. “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in a single year?” she asked rhetorically.
Clinton mused that this meant he was “contributing nothing to our nation,” nothing for Pell grants to help kids go to college, for veterans.
“Trump represents the same rigged system that he claims he’s going to change,” Clinton declared. “The whole story tells us everything we need to know about how Trump does business. After he made all those bad bets and lost all that money, he didn’t lift a finger to help and protect his employees or all the small businesses and the contractors he’d hired.” The people of Atlantic City, where he had three casinos that failed, “they all got hammered, while he was busy with his accountants trying to figure out how he could keep living like a billionaire,” she said.
All the while, she added, as he was using his political connections to collect hundreds of millions in government subsidies, “Trump was taking from America with both hands and leaving the rest of us with the bill,” Clinton said.
During the speech on the economy, she also had the opportunity to talk about the endorsement from basketball great and Ohio native son LeBron James, which he announced Sunday night in an op-ed. Clinton said she had received “a lot of wonderful endorsements over the last year and a half” and was grateful for all of them, “But I gotta say, there’s something special about this one.” She went on to talk about their shared commitment to advocacy for children. James has an Akron-based foundation that mentors elementary school children at risk for dropping out of school. Clinton has an event in Akron Monday, but James is not expected to join her there.
CBS News’ Hannah Fraser-Chanpong contributed to this story