Clinton says Trump’s threats ‘should scare every American’

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Americans regardless of their politics should fear the “kind of threats” made by former President Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee this fall.

In a podcast episode of Democracy Docket’s “Defending Democracy” that aired last Friday, Clinton drew a stark contrast between Trump and President Biden, saying the current president is “modeling responsible leadership, which is not flashy, not engaging in vitriolic attacks on people, in rallies and online, not threatening to execute people and putting them in jail.”

“And the kind of threats that you hear coming out of Donald Trump should scare every American,” said Clinton, the Democratic candidate defeated by Trump in 2016’s presidential race.

Clinton characterized her 2016 opponent as “an authoritarian,” laying out what she sees as the threat Trump poses to institutions.

“Because with an authoritarian, you never know what side of the bed they’ll wake up on, you never know who they’re going to be upset with today, you never know if somebody basically bribes them by giving business to a relative or some other gift, that they will try to destroy one business to advantage another,” she said.

“You just never know because they don’t believe in the rule of law. They don’t believe in institutions and, therefore, if you give them a chance to be more unfettered than he was in his first term — when he was trying to figure out what he could do, and he had actually some people around who were restraining him — that is all going to be gone,” Clinton said.

“If he ever gets back near the White House again, it will be like having a dictator, and I don’t say that lightly.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The Hill also reached out to Clinton’s office for further comment.

Trump and Biden are the major political parties’ presumptive nominees going into the 2024 presidential election this November. According to Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s national poll tracker, Trump (45.3 percent) leads Biden (44.4 percent) by less than 1 percentage point — well within most polls’ margins of error.