Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton squared off Monday with Czech Deputy Prime Minister Petr Macinka during a tense exchange at the Munich Security Conference, highlighting deep divisions over President Donald Trump’s policies and their impact on the West.
Clinton sharply criticized Trump, accusing him of abandoning longstanding Western principles and alliances. Speaking on a panel, she argued that the president had undermined foundational agreements and institutions.
“He has betrayed the West, he’s betrayed human values, he’s betrayed the NATO charter, the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a lot of what has been done before to try to make sense of how difficult it is to restrain people who want unaccountable power,” Clinton said.
She went further, suggesting that Trump’s leadership style mirrors that of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“And none of us in this room, including all of us on this panel, would choose to live under a regime that was so unaccountable that it could act with impunity the way that Putin does, except that’s who Trump is modeling himself as,” she added.
Macinka, who leads a right-wing political party in the Czech Republic, offered a starkly different assessment. Rather than viewing Trump’s actions as a betrayal, he described them as a reaction to what he sees as years of liberal overreach.
“First, I think you really don’t like him,” Macinka said, prompting Clinton to agree.
“That is absolutely true,” Clinton responded. “But I really, not only do I not like him, I don’t like him because of what he’s doing to the United States and the world, and I think you should take a hard look at it if you think that there is something good that will come out of it.”
Macinka argued that Trump’s political rise reflects frustration among ordinary citizens.
“What I think Trump is doing in America, I think it is reaction, reaction, reaction for something that, for some policies that really went too far,” he said. “Too far from the regular people, too far from reality. So you know, we saw the cancel culture, we saw the woke revolution.”
He also criticized what he called “the gender revolution” and “climate alarmism.”
Clinton interjected, asking, “Which gender? Women having their rights?” before the moderator asked her to allow Macinka to finish.
Macinka clarified his position, stating, “I think there are two genders, but some of us think that there is more than one or more than two, sorry, more than two genders. I think there is male and female, and the rest probably is a social construct. So this is something that went too far.”
Clinton then pivoted the discussion to foreign policy, specifically Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine. She pointed to his scaling back of support for Ukrainian forces fighting Russia and questioned whether cultural debates justified such moves.
She asked whether disagreements over gender ideology warranted “selling out the people of Ukraine who are on the front lines dying to save their freedom and their two genders, if that’s what you’re worried about?”
Macinka pushed back, requesting the opportunity to complete his remarks. “Can I please finish my points? I’m sorry that it makes you nervous. I’m really sorry for that,” he said.
“It doesn’t make me nervous,” Clinton replied. “It makes me very, very unhappy.”
The exchange underscored the broader ideological divide playing out not only within the United States but across Europe, as leaders debate the direction of Western alliances, cultural values and the global role of American leadership under Trump.
