Hillary Clinton on Tuesday warned that if President Donald Trump were “left to his own devices,” he would take steps to emulate authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Asked on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America” whether she thinks Trump might take steps to emulate Putin and his regime, Clinton said, “Yes.”
“I think Trump, left to his own devices, unchecked, would become even more authoritarian than he has tried to be,” she said. “I’m not saying he’s going to start killing journalists, but I am saying that he likes the idea of unaccountable, unchecked power. And we’ve never had to face that in a serious way in our country.”
She cited the Republican practice of gerrymandering “to control state legislatures, elect Republican governors and to call a constitutional convention.”
“And if you really get deep into what they’re advocating — limits on the First Amendment, no limits on the Second Amendment, limits on criminal justice — I mean, there is a very insidious right-wing agenda,” Clinton said.
She called it “a very clear agenda that is hard for Americans to really kind of wrap our heads around because we’ve never had to deal with anything like this before.”
“We’ve got to pay attention to it,” Clinton said. “Because the one thing we can do to rein it in, besides fulminating online or, you know, speaking or writing books, is to do everything possible to take back the House in 2018 and hold the line in the Senate. There is no more important mission.”
