Hillary Clinton has a good chance of being the Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential election. This is extremely surprising to me considering how few Americans actually trust her. In a recent poll released by the Daily Caller News Foundation, Clinton was the only candidate to have twice as many people rate her as “not honest and trustworthy” as she was rated “honest and trustworthy.” Clinton received 27 percent honest and 56 percent not honest.

In my opinion, Americans have a good reason not to trust Clinton as she consistently contradicts herself and sometimes outright lies. There is also proof that she might be hiding a lot of important things about herself from the public. 

Let’s talk about a few of the times when Clinton completely lied to or mislead the public. 

In 2008, Clinton said in several speeches that she had landed under sniper fire in Bosnia. I don’t know if this was an attempt to impress voters, but it simply wasn’t true. Videos showed Clinton nonchalantly exiting the plane with no danger in sight. I know this lie took place seven years ago, but as she continues to mislead the public, I think it still makes a strong statement about her character.

For the majority of her career, Clinton was not in favor of the legalization of gay marriage. 

“I l believe that marriage is … between a man and a woman, she said in 2004.”  In 2010 she reiterated that point, saying, “I have not supported same-sex marriage.” 

Yet in 2013 she gamed out in favor of same-sex marriage. In my opinion, Clinton changed her mind on this issue for political reasons. She wanted to be viewed favorably by voters because same-sex marriage was getting closer to acceptance and legalization in the United States.

It’s OK for Clinton to occasionally change her mind about controversial topics, but when she consistently contradicts herself, I’m led to believe that she often just says what she knows people want to hear. Clinton has contradicted herself more than she has remained consistent in her views, and that speaks volumes about her motive.

In April 2015, Clinton claimed that all of her grandparents came to America from foreign countries. Politifact, an organization well respected for fact checking politicians, found Clinton’s claim to be false. Its research found that only one of her grandparents had immigrated to the United States, while the other three were born in the United States. The real story isn’t as flashy. While, again, this isn’t a huge lie, it shows that she has no problem fabricating the truth to get voters to see her in a more favorable light. 

Politifact also found that Clinton’s claim that “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” when she and Bill Clinton left the White House after his time as president, to be “mostly false.”

Dig around on the internet and you can find more instances of Hillary Clinton either lying or drastically changing her stance on political topics. 

I can’t write about Hillary Clinton’s lack of trustworthiness without mentioning her email scandal. If you ask me, the scandal is substantial proof that she has a lot to hide from us about her career. To sum it up for those who don’t know the full story, Hillary Clinton basically used a private email server instead of a government email account when she was secretary of state. The major issue is that this unauthorized server was not secure enough to send government grade documents.

When government officials went to retrieve those emails to see which ones needed to be filed away in public record, they found that many of the emails were missing. Hillary Clinton and her advisers had deleted about 30,000 emails, claiming they were personal to her. Whether this was legal or illegal is still up in the air, but I personally think that there might have been content in those emails that would have drastically hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming president, and so she chose to delete them.

Americans are right not to trust Hillary Clinton.