Hillary Clinton has said the United States needs to ‘be ready’ for the possibility that Donald Trump will refuse to leave the White House if he loses in November’s election.
Speaking to Trevor Noah on Monday night’s episode of The Daily Show, Clinton said she could not rule out voter suppression and foreign interference in this year’s vote.
Noah asked whether he may attempt, if he loses, to claim that the election was illegitimate and blame mail-in voting.
‘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, according to The Daily Beast.
‘And we have to be ready for that.’
Hillary Clinton on Monday night spoke to Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show
Clinton said that Trump’s repeated warnings of mass voting fraud, if mail-in ballots are in widespread use in November, did not stand up to scrutiny.
‘There have been so many academic studies and other analyses, which point out that it’s just an inaccurate, fraudulent claim,’ she said.
Clinton said there remained however ‘real danger’ of an election rigged to lower the turnout, or meddled with from abroad.
She 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.
‘Look, I want a fair election,’ she said.
‘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, 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.’
Clinton was asked about the November election and the possibility of Trump calling fraud. She said it was ‘a fair point to raise as to whether or not, if he loses, he’s going to go quietly or not’
Donald Trump, pictured on Monday, may not ‘go quietly’ if he loses in November, she warned
Clinton, who remains a divisive figure, is yet to campaign for this year’s presumptive Democrat nominee, Joe Biden.
Noah, who returned on Monday from a two week July 4th break, asked Clinton how she had been spending her time during lockdown.
‘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,”‘ he said.
‘Well, you know, before the lockdown I was doing all of that,’ Clinton joked in response.
‘I mean there’s probably video.’
Clinton challenged Trump for the presidency in 2016, and is pictured at an October debate
Trump, pictured on Monday, has frequently expressed concern about mail-in voting
Clinton also attacked Trump for commuting his friend Roger Stone’s prison sentence – a decision the White House announced on Friday night.
‘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.’
She said that Stone’s commutation was yet one more reason to vote Trump out of office in November, so the full scale of his behavior could be brought to light with a new president in power.
‘But, you know, unless Trump is defeated at the polls in November, 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,’ she said.
‘So Roger Stone was in the middle of it all. And that’s why Trump had to cover it up.’