Hillary Clinton Tells Rainbow PUSH Convention That Trump Is Running a 'Revolution to Turn the Clock Back'

What Clinton Said, Verbatim

Speaking at Rainbow PUSH's South Side Chicago headquarters on June 12, Hillary Clinton told the audience: "We are in a counterrevolution. It is a revolution to turn the clock back and take away the rights we have worked so hard to achieve. This counterrevolutionary crew in Washington right now doesn't want us to be a Rainbow Nation."

That quote was captured on video and posted by the Thomas Sowell Quotes account on X, and confirmed by reporting from ArcaMax and MEAWW.

She argued that the movement Democrats need cannot be top-down. "We don't need to have a bunch of elected officials leading this new movement," Clinton said, according to ArcaMax. "We need to have it be from the bottom up, the grassroots, coming back to get organized and move forward again."

She also took aim at Trump's foreign policy, calling his handling of Iran "incoherent" and "unmoored from reality," according to MEAWW.

The Setting

This was the first Rainbow PUSH Coalition annual convention since the death of its founder, Reverend Jesse Jackson, in February 2026. His son Yusef Jackson, who took over as CEO in April, moderated a conversation with Clinton on stage, according to ArcaMax.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also appeared at the event, calling the Trump administration "corrupt," according to ZeroHedge. Clinton was born in Chicago and raised in Park Ridge, making the venue a homecoming of sorts.

C-SPAN archived the full broadcast, logged as airing June 13, 2026, from 2:47 to 3:32 p.m. EDT.

What She's Actually Arguing

Clinton's core claim is that civil rights gains from the 1960s through the early 2000s—voting rights, anti-discrimination protections, civil rights legislation—are being systematically dismantled by the Trump administration. She told Yusef Jackson that neither his father nor she and Bill Clinton anticipated, even in the 1990s, that they would face "a concerted effort to turn the clock back," according to ArcaMax.

Her prescription: clergy, business leaders, civic organizers, and young people leading from the bottom up, not waiting on Washington.

Grassroots organizing did, in fact, drive the original civil rights movement. The concern that executive-branch actions—executive orders, agency rulemaking, DOJ priorities—can erode statutory protections without a congressional vote is a real structural issue. Supporters of Clinton's position would say she's describing something measurable and specific.

The Counterargument

The other side of this is equally straightforward. Trump won the 2024 election decisively. The policies Clinton is calling a "revolution"—tighter immigration enforcement, rolling back DEI mandates, restructuring federal agencies—were campaigned on explicitly and endorsed by voters. Describing the elected majority's agenda as a "counterrevolution" is a rhetorical move that frames democratic outcomes as illegitimate when they go the wrong way. That framing didn't work well for Democrats in 2024.

On the Iran criticism specifically, Clinton did not offer specific policy alternatives in what the sources report, only the characterization of "incoherence" and "unmoored from reality."

ZeroHedge's Framing vs. the Record

ZeroHedge devoted significant space in its coverage to Clinton's personal history—specifically her family's documented interactions with Jeffrey Epstein and the assertion that "around 90% of Epstein's political contributions went to the Democratic Party." This framing shifts focus from what Clinton actually said at this event to a broader character attack.

The factual record on Epstein's political donations is more complicated than ZeroHedge implies. Epstein donated to both parties over his lifetime, and the claim that 90% went to Democrats has been disputed by multiple financial researchers who note his donations spanned Republican and Democratic recipients. ZeroHedge does not source that specific figure to any named study or filing in its coverage.

ZeroHedge asserts a specific 90% figure without attribution. The other sources don't repeat it.

No Charges, No Investigation

To be precise about the legal picture: as of June 14, 2026, no investigation has been announced and no charges have been filed against Hillary Clinton in connection with anything discussed at this event or referenced in this coverage.

What Comes Next

Clinton's call for grassroots organizing raises a practical question that none of the sources answer: who leads it? The institutional Democratic Party is fractured, its donor class uncertain, and its bench of unifying figures thin after Jackson's death. Whether Rainbow PUSH itself, under Yusef Jackson's leadership, can serve as an organizing hub for the movement Clinton described is the concrete unresolved question. The answer will do more to determine 2026 and 2028 outcomes than any speech in Chicago.