Former US president Donald Trump plans to use the military to round up and terrorize Americans, failed US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told CNN on Saturday.
The Republican frontrunner would become a “dictator on day one,” Clinton insisted, listing several affronts to democracy the Republican frontrunner supposedly had in store for Americans.
“He wants to round up people because of the way they look. They may or may not be undocumented, it doesn’t matter to him. He wants to call out the army to do that,” she claimed. “He wants to use the Insurrection Act to militarize American law enforcement.”
The former president was also plotting with a “team of right-wing thinkers” to “rid the government of any kind of independent expertise,” she claimed, referring to the conservative Project 2025 blueprint purportedly aimed at giving Trump a head start on draining the proverbial swamp.
“When he said memorably during Covid, ‘Maybe you should inject yourself with bleach,’ instead of looking shocked, [his cabinet will] say, “Yes sir, Mr. President,” she speculated.
“He wants to bend the government of the United States to his will, just like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin did to Russia,” she argued, insisting the former president would pull the US out of NATO as soon as the opportunity arose.
Clinton used her spot on a Saturday panel at the Munich Security Conference to issue a similar warning, urging those present to take Trump “literally and seriously” regarding his suggestion he would abandon allies to Moscow’s predation. “He will do everything he can to become an absolute authoritarian leader if given the opportunity to do so, and he will pull us out of NATO,” she said.
While Trump claimed at a rally in South Carolina earlier this month that he had told a delinquent NATO ally the US would not defend it if attacked unless it paid its bills – comments that loomed large over the conference – he did not threaten to pull the US out of the alliance during that speech, though he has floated the idea in the past.
Likewise, Trump did not actually advise Americans to inject themselves with bleach during the Covid-19 pandemic, though his suggestion that medical science explore the possibility of deploying “disinfectant” inside the body was widely condemned as ill-informed and irresponsible.
Clinton has long held Russia and Putin chiefly responsible for her 2016 election loss to Trump, though she has also blamed her erstwhile Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, former FBI chief James Comey, the looming specter of misogyny, and the voters themselves for her failure. Despite her campaign’s exhaustive efforts to paint the Republican as a Kremlin puppet, a special counsel investigation found no evidence he had colluded with Moscow.