Bill and Hillary Clinton have given a pair of back-to-back interviews warning that US democracy was in danger and that Donald Trump is to blame.
“I actually think there’s a fair chance that we could completely lose our constitutional democracy for a couple of decades if we keep making – if we make bad decisions,” Mr. Clinton said, speaking to The Late Late Show host James Corden on Wednesday following the third televised hearing of the January 6 committee on the 2021 Capitol riots.
“I’m not naïve about this. I’ve been in a lot of fights. I’ve lost some, won a bunch. I’ve been elated and heartbroken. But I’ve never before been as worried about the structure of our democratic form of government,” Clinton added.
Given a softball question about his favourite “fictional president” in the movies, Clinton quipped that he “liked Tony Goldwyn, I liked Martin Sheen, I liked Michael Douglas, I loved Harrison Ford and Morgan Freeman and Donald Trump and…”
In her own interview with the Financial Times on Friday, Mrs. Clinton echoed her husband’s concerns, suggesting the US was “on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window.”
The former secretary of state said that “the most important thing” for Democrats was to win the next election. “The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority,” she stressed.
Characterizing herself as “the most investigated innocent person in America,” Clinton dubbed 2016 as a “traumatic event” and a “break in history…a piece of unfinished business.” She went on to make Trump-style allegations about being robbed of the presidency. “Literally within hours of the polls closing in 2016, we had so much evidence pouring in about voters being turned away in Milwaukee and not being able to vote in Detroit,” she recalled.
“Even in his reptilian brain, Trump has to know that he lost this time,” Clinton said, referring to the 2020 cycle. “He refuses to accept it because it wasn’t supposed to happen,” the former first lady said, predicting that Trump will run again in 2024 “if he can.”
“Follow the money with Trump – he’s raised about $130 million sitting in his bank account that he used to travel around, to fund organizing against elections…I don’t know who will challenge him in the Republican primary,” she said.
Clinton emphasized that she expects President Biden to run again in 2024, and dismissed the prospect that she herself could take another crack at the presidency, saying this was “out of the question.”
Mrs. Clinton also chimed in on the current crisis in Russia-US relations over Ukraine, accusing Vladimir Putin of being “very sexist toward” her during their meetings while she served as secretary of state, and of “manspread[ing] for effect.”
“If Trump had won in 2020 he would have pulled out of NATO – I have no doubt about that,” Clinton insisted.
The Clinton power couple’s media offensive comes on the heels of a fresh Yahoo News/YouGov poll this week in which majorities of Democrats and Republicans agreed that it is “likely” for the US to “cease being a democracy” at some point, with 49 percent of those polled (including independents) expressing this sentiment. 52 percent of Republicans, 50 percent of independents and 46 percent of Democrats also agreed that it was likely “there will be a civil war in the United States” in their lifetimes, with only 47 percent willing to rule out “taking up arms against the government” to “protect the country from radical extremists.”