At a campaign stop in Georgia on Monday, Bill Clinton had some fun at the expense of the state’s most rabble-rousing ultraconservative member of Congress: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He referenced the conspiracy theory she touted earlier this month in the wake of Hurricane Helene. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X, without specifying who exactly “they” are. In another post, she also emphasized how the devastation in the Southeast could affect the election—likely in a way that hurts Donald Trump.
Clinton, stumping for Kamala Harris in Columbus, Georgia, described the widespread devastation to western North Carolina, saying, “It was terribly damaging to Asheville, which is pretty much a Democratic city, but it also hurt all these rural counties that were mostly Republican and they acted like we’d done something unfair.”
The former president dismissed those claims, though he did acknowledge that such storms can hamper voting. He recalled visiting coastal North Carolina in 2016, the year Hurricane Matthew pummeled the region, saying he met with people who supported his wife, Hillary Clinton, but who had lost everything.
“I didn’t see how Hillary could possibly win,” Clinton said. “I knew their lives were wrecked and they couldn’t get themselves together to go vote and there wouldn’t be an organization to do it. So now they say we have the power…”
He paused, and the audience started shouting that they did indeed have the power. But Clinton was taking it in a different direction.
“…To change the weather?” he asked as the crowd laughed.
Besides flipping the outcome of the election eight years ago, the former president added that he might have done a few other things differently if he had the power the Georgia congresswoman suggested.
“I love being in politics,” Clinton said. “And I love public service. But if I’d had the power to change the weather, I’d have been in a different line of work. I would have underwritten this entire campaign if that had happened.”