Bill Clinton assails Trump at Clinton Global Initiative speech

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas posted the YouTube video headlined “🚨Clinton GOES FOR KILL….” The channel’s description says the clip shows former President Bill Clinton calling out Donald Trump in strong terms at the Clinton Global Initiative and delivering a warning about the direction Trump is taking the United States.

The same description promotes pre-orders for the new MeidasTouch book WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy.

Clinton delivered the remarks on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, while opening the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2026 summit in New York. The year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States, a milestone he referenced repeatedly. Clinton, 80, did not mention Trump by name.

He opened by saying, “I think it's important to take a few minutes to assess where we are now and the environment in which we are meeting.” He then turned to Trump’s planned triumphal arch bridging Washington and Virginia, which has been announced to incorporate a top-grade military complex for storing drones and described as a sniper and drone facility. “I suppose I could take my entire allotted time to discuss the self-evident wisdom of building an Arc de Triomphe in Washington to hold all our drones,” Clinton said. The line drew laughs. “Some of this stuff — it's hard to make up,” he added.

Clinton next addressed the Kennedy Center. A federal judge last week blocked the Trump-picked board’s effort to add Trump’s name to the institution and rename its campus after him. “I personally think that the way we've argued about what's going on at the Kennedy Center and all that kind of stuff — I think we've been majoring in the minors,” he said. “You really think 100 years from now anybody's going to care very much about whose name's on what building? Isn't it more important what happens in the building? And what happens outside the building?”

He framed the moment in larger terms. “Over the course of a lifetime, there are only so many real opportunities to make decisions that we know will shape our personal history and the history of those we live with and care about for a long time to come. This is one of those moments.” Clinton said he still believes, as he did “30 years ago-plus when I ran for president as a virtual child,” that “diversity is a positive thing, not a negative one.” He criticized zero-sum thinking on both the right and the left and what he called their dueling visions of socialism. He also pointed to the outcry in Minnesota after federal agents shot two U.S. citizens during immigration enforcement and to the Supreme Court’s denial, for now, of Trump administration restrictions on voting by mail.