Hillary Clinton: We Have to Be Ready if Trump Doesn’t ‘Go Quietly’
Trevor Noah returned from a two-week July 4 break with a very big guest: Hillary Clinton.
The Daily Show host began his remote interview by asking the former Secretary of State what she’s been up to during quarantine. “Because I know if I was in your position, I would spend most of my time tweeting, ‘I told you so’ and I would walk around the street just looking at people saying, ‘It could have been me, it could have been me.’”
“Well, you know, before the lockdown I was doing all of that,” Clinton joked in response. “I mean there’s probably video.”
But things turned more serious when Noah asked Clinton how she’s feeling about the 2020 race. “It seems like America is on an ominous path to a November date when there is going to be a lot of questions in and around the election,” the host said. “Donald Trump is vehemently against mail-in voting. What do you make of this and what do you think the path is to getting people the easiest access to casting their votes?”
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Clinton argued that Republicans will try to “prevent as many people who think they won’t vote for them from voting,” specifically young people, African Americans and Hispanics. But beyond that, Noah wanted to know if Clinton thinks Trump will try to undermine the legitimacy of the entire election if he loses.
“Well, I think it is a fair point to raise as to whether or not, if he loses, he’s going to go quietly or not,” she said. “And we have to be ready for that. But there have been so many academic studies and other analyses, which point out that it’s just an inaccurate, fraudulent claim.”
Steering the conversation back to the “real danger” of voter suppression and foreign interference, Clinton said, “Look, I want a fair election. If people get to vote and they, for whatever reason, vote for Donald Trump, OK, we’ll accept it. Not happily.”
“But I don't think that’s what will happen,” she continued, “because I think the more people who can actually get to the polls, whether by mail or in person, and get their votes counted, then we are going to have the kind of election we should have. And then it will be a win both in the popular vote and the Electoral College.”
Later, Clinton blasted Trump for commuting his friend Roger Stone’s prison sentence. “It’s a continuation of the cover-up,” she said. “Because the one thing that Trump is fearful of, when it comes to his being president, is that finally we will see how illegitimate his victory actually was. And how he was involved in the seeking of foreign help and the utilization of it. And how Roger Stone was critical to that.”
“But, you know, unless Trump is defeated at the polls in November,” she concluded, “we will never really know everything there is to know about this really deep, ongoing dismantling of institutions and undermining the rule of law and the original sin of the way that he actually won the election. So Roger Stone was in the middle of it all. And that’s why Trump had to cover it up.”
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