Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, said Wednesday that Hillary Clinton was a "terrible candidate" for president in many ways.

Reich appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to discuss his book The Common Good, in which he argues that American politics has declined in its "sense of the common good." At the conclusion of the interview, co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Reich whether Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were "equally as selfish" in the 2016 presidential election.

Brzezinski granted that her question was "tough" for Reich to answer, but she asked whether the Clintons partly helped Trump's rise.

"I think that Hillary Clinton was not the best candidate," Reich responded. "In fact, in many respects, she was a terrible candidate."

He went on to tell Brzezinski that Trump is part of a larger cultural decline toward selfishness.

"Donald Trump is, I think—I think he is not the cause; he's the consequence of this multi-year, many-decade decline in a sense of common good," Reich said. "The Constitution was created for we the people coming together to form a more perfect union, not for I, the selfish jerk, trying to make as much money and as much power as possible."

Reich endorsed Clinton's candidacy against Trump, but in the Democratic primary, he was a passionate surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). Reich told Vox in 2016 that Clinton was the best candidate to run the U.S. government, but he supported Sanders because he wanted to fundamentally change the system.