In an interview with Spain's La Razon newspaper, Madeleine Albright, who recently accused Trump of bolstering "fascism and the tendencies that lead to fascism" worldwide, admitted that she didn't believe the president himself was a fascist.
"I want to make it clear that I'm not calling Trump a fascist, but I do believe he is the most undemocratic president in modern US history," Albright said, speaking to the Spanish-language daily. "He believes he can be above the law, he doesn't respect institutions, and he insults the media by calling them the 'enemy of the people'," the former secretary complained.
Turning to the 2020 elections, Albright said that "it would be very bad if Trump were reelected. I have been to Europe many times recently, and leaders here are very confused about what the United States is saying and doing, and it seems that six more years of Trump would be very dangerous," she said.
Albright stressed that Trump's opponents were now "working very hard" ahead of the upcoming midterm election to elect a Congress which could serve as a counterweight to Trump.
Attack on Putin and Orban
Turning to other world leaders, Albright called Russian President Vladimir Putin a threat to Europe and accused him of seeking to "undermine democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and return those areas to the Russian sphere of influence." She charged Putin with trying to "separate" Europe from the US and claimed that Moscow "wants to undermine American democracy," reiterating a baseless claim she has repeated many times before.
Emphasizing that she was "a great defender of NATO," Albright suggested that the alliance's "most important problem now" was "the behavior of Turkey, one of its key members, because it is buying weapons from Russia." Albright also defended NATO's expansionism, saying it's "not about American expansionism, but about the desire of countries to be part of the alliance."
Finally, Albright also went off on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, accusing him of being a "spoiled child," and calling him a "cynical and opportunistic demagogue who criticized George Soros when it was Soros who paid for his education in England." Soros paid for Orban's scholarship to Oxford in 1989, after the end of communism. In the years since, the Hungarian politician has become a virulent critic of Soros and his Open Society Foundations, expelling the network from Hungary over its support for uncontrolled migration.
Albright served as President Bill Clinton's secretary of state from 1997 to 2001 and actively lobbied for the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which led to thousands of civilian deaths and serious damage to the country's infrastructure. The use of depleted uranium in the strikes continues to be felt to this day. In 1996, she famously said on 60 Minutes that the price of the half-a-million children who died as a result of the US-backed UN sanctions against Iraq were "worth it." Albright also presided over the start of NATO's eastward expansion, despite unprecedentedly warm relations between the US and Boris Yeltsin's Russia in the 1990s. In 2016, Albright said there was a "special place in hell" for women who didn't support Hillary Clinton against Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 election.
