Former Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley said Saturday that "all of us need to take personal responsibility" for President Donald Trump winning the election in November and noted that his party "failed to have enough credibility to make the argument that we were best prepared" to lead the country.
"All of us need to take personal responsibility in doing all that we can to fix what we've broke now in our country," the former Maryland governor told Yasmin Vossoughian on MSNBC. "We also need to win back our statehouses.
"Every person in the United States has a lot of power and a lot of voice," he added. "None of us can afford to go silent.
"I hope that's where we all direct our energies, to call forward the goodness that's within our country.
"There's a lot of it out there, and it just needs to be called forward."
O'Malley, an early primary challenger to Democrat Hillary Clinton, declined to attack the eventual nominee for blaming her loss on several factors, including Russian hacking, former FBI Director James Comey's disclosures about the agency's email investigation and poor Democratic Party resources.
"The Russian interference is unprecedented, and I believe the collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russians will ultimately be proved to have been criminal collusion," O'Malley told Vossoughian. "That's a very, very real consideration.
"At the same time, we as a Democratic Party, failed to have enough credibility to make the argument that we were best prepared to make our economy more inclusive, to make wages go up.
"A very strong argument in this race would have been to say: 'Look, this long recovery is only half complete. Our nation is creating jobs, but we have to make wages go up and not down as Donald Trump wants to do.'
"That I think would have been the better argument," he said. "But we needed to have credibility to do that."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.