The 76-year-old recently appeared on the Defending Democracy podcast where she endorsed POTUS Joe Biden and urged voters to refrain from choosing Trump for a second term in the White House who, as per her allegations, plans to “kill and imprison” his opponents.
Clinton shared her perspective on the 2024 presidential race and told the podcast host, Marc Elias, “Trump was like, you know, just gaga over Putin because Putin does what Trump would like to do: Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance.”
Elias is a Democratic election lawyer who was previously a general counsel on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In their conversation, the former US Secretary of State compared Trump with the likes of Vladimir Putin and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and alleged he’d be following in their footsteps if he returned to the Oval Office, calling the prospects “very scary.”
“That’s what Trump really wants,” the politician continued. “And so we have to be very conscious of how he sees the world because, in that world, he only sees strongmen leaders. He sees Putin, he sees Xi, he sees Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Those are the people he is modeling himself after, and we’ve been down this road in our, you know, world history. We sure don’t want to go down that again.”
In contrast, she spoke highly of Trump’s 2024 presidential race opponent Biden. Referring to one of the most common points of critique for the current POTUS (his age), Clinton admitted, “They say Joe Biden is old. I say you’re right. Joe Biden is old, [but] he’s also effective, compassionate, he cares about people,” adding, “Donald Trump is old and he has 91 federal criminal indictments against him.”
Additionally, she warned people of Trump’s close ties with Russia’s leader Putin and his involvement in the United States’ affairs, a narrative she’s been pushing since losing the presidential race in 2016. She alleged that once the former president returned, he’d attempt to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and be an authoritarian.
“Withdrawing us from NATO, not caring about what happens with Europe … The idea that he wants Ukraine to fail,” she asserted. “The idea that he doesn’t want us to be able to surveil our enemies. This is a very scary prospect.” Clinton alerted, “Trump would basically do whatever he wanted, it’s really important to think about what could happen to our world with Trump back in the White House.”
The former First Lady has previously argued Trump’s dictatorial attitude on ABC’s daytime talk show The View in November 2023, “Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”
However, Trump’s spokesperson called Clinton “delusional” in a statement to the Washington Examiner, “Hillary continues to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and can’t seem to accept the results of the 2016 election. So she is now trying to tell herself lies, in addition to trying to gaslight the American people, into believing her own warped and perverted views.”