Hillary Clinton has known presidents, the Democratic front-runner told a crowd of supporters at a California rally Friday afternoon. She’s married to one, was secretary of state for another and has worked with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes.

And that, she said, is why she’s so devoted to taking down Donald Trump.


Less than 24 hours after shredding Trump’s foreign policy in a San Diego speech, Hillary Clinton was back on the offensive Friday, hammering the Republican nominee as unfit to hold the office of president at her second rally of the day in Los Angeles.

“President Lincoln said, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ Donald Trump seems to think that divisiveness is what we need in America, when I believe that is absolutely wrong,” Clinton said. “So I’ve had this privilege of seeing presidents, of knowing how hard this job is, whether I agreed with the decisions they made or not. And that’s why I feel so strongly that we must stand up against this divisive, dangerous, hateful rhetoric coming from Donald Trump.”

She devoted nearly her entire stump speech Friday afternoon to criticizing Trump, attacking his positions on the minimum wage, health care, abortion and income inequality, among others. Clinton devoted special attention to Trump’s immigration plan, conjuring images of government forces storming into immigrant communities, searching for undocumented workers.

“His idea about immigration is to create what he’s calling a ‘deportation force,’” she said. “Some of you came from countries where that happened, where they knock down doors and they go in and they pull people out. That is what Donald Trump is proposing happen in our country. That is so un-American, so dangerous.”

The Clinton campaign kicked off its wave of Trump attacks with a 9 a.m. news release Friday from Hillary for America Director of Latino Outreach Lorella Praeli, slamming the GOP nominee’s attacks on a federal judge overseeing a civil fraud case against Trump University.

Trump called U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s Mexican heritage “an inherent conflict of interest,” a statement that has drawn criticism not just from Clinton and other Democrats, but from House Speaker Paul Ryan as well.

“Judge Curiel and his family epitomize the American Dream,” Praeli said in the statement released Friday morning. “The fact that Donald Trump doesn't see Judge Curiel and his family as Americans makes him unfit to be president of this great nation, a nation of immigrants. In Trump's version of America, this Latino family isn't really American. But they are America.”

Clinton herself attacked Trump’s comments on Curiel in an interview on Friday with Los Angeles ABC affiliate KABC-TV.

“If our president doesn’t believe in the rule of law, doesn’t believe in our Constitution with a separation of power with an independent judiciary, that is one of the most dangerous signals that we are dealing with somebody who is a demagogue,” she said.

“If we start disqualifying people because of who their parents and grandparents might be and where they came from,” Clinton continued. “That would be running counter to everything we believe in.”

She also renewed her assault on Trump’s foreign policy record, responding to a tweet from the real estate magnate in which he accused Clinton of fabricating his positions in her Thursday speech.

“You said literally all those things,” Clinton replied on Twitter, along with a link to a post on her campaign website offering a nearly line-by-line annotation of Thursday’s speech matched with quotes from Trump himself.

“I didn’t make any of that up. I mean, it would be hard to make up. And by the end of working on that speech, even I was saying, ‘Did he really say all of this?’ Well indeed he did,” Clinton joked at an earlier rally in Los Angeles. “And I believe absolutely that he is not only unprepared to be president, he is temperamentally unfit to be president. He doesn’t really have ideas, he just engages in rants and personal feuds and outright lies, something that our country cannot afford in a commander in chief.”