Hillary Clinton’s Midterm Pitch: Investigate Trump’s ‘Supporters and Allies.’ Buckle Up

Written By TNT Staff, Posted on October 30, 2026

Featured photo: Hillary Clinton’s official portrait as Secretary of State. U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five days before the midterms, Hillary Clinton told Democrats what a new majority would do first. Not lower grocery bills. Not cheaper gas. Investigations.

On the Oct. 28 episode of High Stakes, the Vox Media podcast she co-hosts with Kara Swisher, Clinton predicted President Trump would soon face “a Democratic Congress trying to rein him in, hold him accountable, and investigate him, his administration, his family, his supporters and allies.” Then she added: “So buckle up. The election is just the beginning.” The remarks come at about the 1:12 mark of the episode, according to a published transcript and the Rothman Report’s account of the episode.

“His supporters”

Investigating an administration is Congress’s job, and Republicans did plenty of it under President Biden. But Clinton did not stop at the administration. She named Trump’s family, his “allies” and his “supporters.” More than 77 million Americans voted for Trump in 2024: 77,302,580, according to the Federal Election Commission’s official results. Clinton did not say which supporters she had in mind, or what they would be investigated for.

That vagueness is the problem. This is the same politician who said in September 2016 that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” according to Time. Now she is talking about a congressional majority that would go after the people around the president, five days before voters decide who controls the House. It is fair to ask whether “hold him accountable” means oversight or payback.

She also cited the idea from behavioral psychology that people “in what’s called the domain of loss” will “double down on risk,” and predicted Trump would “most likely launch more attacks on Iran.” She said Trump “has held Republicans hostage for a decade” and that the hostages would eventually decide to “take him on.”

Affordability as an afterthought

To be fair, Clinton did mention prices. She said Democratic leaders want to “start introducing legislation to deal with affordability” on day one, and she closed by calling affordability and corruption “the two big issues.” But in the same episode she named no specific bill on grocery prices, housing or energy. The investigations got the big line. The kitchen-table plan got a sentence.

Voters have seen this movie. After Democrats took the House in 2018, the next two years were dominated by the Russia probe, impeachment and subpoena fights. Clinton is telling voters, in her own words, to expect the sequel.

If Democrats want to win on the cost of living, they should lead with the cost of living. Promising to investigate a president’s “supporters” is not an economic plan. It is a warning, and Clinton was honest enough to say so. Voters should take her at her word: buckle up.

TNT Staff