Former US Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton says the United States is on the brink of losing its democracy.
“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” Clinton said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Friday.
She went on to say that the most important thing for American democracy now is to win the next presidential election and “the alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”
Asked whether she thinks former US president Donald Trump will run in 2024 presidential election, she said, “I think if he can he’s going to run again.”
“Follow the money with Trump — he’s raised about $130 mn sitting in his bank account that he used to travel around, to fund organizing against elections.”
She also touched upon Trump’s continued false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through voter fraud and other irregularities—claims repeatedly rejected by the courts.
“Trump has to know that he lost this time. He refuses to accept it because it wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said.
Clinton also predicted that President Joe Biden would run again in 2024, saying, “He certainly intends to run.” However, she said that the idea that she would run for president after her 2016 loss is “out of the question.”
About the future of Ukraine’s conflict, she said that Russian President Vladimir “Putin’s only realistic path to victory in Ukraine would be Trump’s re-election in 2024.”
“If Trump had won in 2020 he would have pulled out of NATO — I have no doubt about that,” she added.
Trump was frequently critical of NATO countries during his presidency, often claiming that NATO members were delinquent in payments to the US.
On Friday, the former president once again blamed the Ukrainian conflict on Biden, insisting that “if I was president that would never have happened and I got to know Putin very well and we talked about it.”
“If the election weren’t rigged and stolen, we wouldn’t have had any problems with Ukraine being attacked viciously,” he said.
The Russian-Ukrainian war has now lasted more than 100 days and Biden’s administration has provided billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian government and imposed harsh sanctions on Russia.