Hillary Clinton took to the stage Thursday to endorse Kathy Hochul for New York governor but spent much of her speech attacking former President Donald Trump and Republicans who have sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In her keynote address at the New York State Democratic Convention in midtown Manhattan, the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate began discussing the challenges Americans have faced during the pandemic, but quickly pivoted to national politics.

Clinton called the U.S. “deeply and dangerously divided.”

“It is one thing to have political disagreements — those are natural and healthy,” she said. “But it is an entirely different thing all together to lose a shared sense of truth, facts and reality itself.”

The former senator and first lady said she hoped defeating Trump in 2020 would begin to heal the country’s divisions but that it’s clear now “the struggle for unity and democracy is far from over.”

“When the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection as ‘legitimate political discourse,’ when storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers, trying to overturn an election are being normalized, we are in uncharted territory,” Clinton said. 

She said the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was a “gift” to autocracies around the world, including Russia and China. 

“They know something we need to remember: America is only as strong as our unity and our democracy allow us to be,” Clinton said.

“We must reject the big lie about the 2020 election and the cover-up of the insurrection of last Jan. 6,” she added.

Clinton also said Americans cannot get distracted by “the latest culture-war nonsense or some new right-wing lie on Fox and Facebook.”

The former secretary of state seemed to acknowledge that she’s been the subject of reports in recent days accusing her 2016 presidential campaign of spying on Trump, even after he was president. The accusation stems from a court filing last week by John Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, although reports in conservative media and Trump himself have made misleading claims about the filing. 

Speaking on the same day when a judge ruled Trump and his children must testify in the New York attorney general’s investigation of their business practices, Clinton said: “It's funny —  the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get. So now his accountants have fired him and investigations draw closer to him, and right on cue the noise machine gets turned up, doesn’t it?”

Clinton listed a number of issues she believes are at stake in this year’s congressional midterm elections, including affordable health care and housing, climate change, voting rights and abortion rights. She said she plans to “work my heart out to elect Democrats up and down the ticket this November.”

She threw her support behind Hochul, who was elevated from lieutenant governor to governor after Andrew Cuomo resigned in August 2021 over a series of sexual harassment allegations. The state Democratic Party voted to endorse Hochul at the convention, although she still faces primary challengers.

“She is a governor for all of us,” Clinton said of Hochul. “And by the way, isn't it about time that the state that gave birth to the women's suffrage movement, the state that has always been at the forefront of progress and reform — isn't it about time we elect a woman as our governor?”

Trump released a statement Thursday evening repeating the spying accusations against Clinton and accusing New York Attorney General Letitia James of a politically motivated investigation. 

“The targeting of a President of the United States, who got more votes while in office than any President in History, by far, and is a person that the Radical Left Democrats don’t want to run again, represents an unconstitutional attack on our Country … ,” he said. “It is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in history.”