Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has voiced her support for President Donald Trump’s removal from office via impeachment, called on lawmakers who joined him in subverting democracy to resign, and demanded stronger measures against white supremacist extremism in America.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee who lost the election to Trump detailed her thoughts on the appropriate response to last Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol by a mob he incited.
The violence was predictable, Clinton asserted, considering Trump’s years-long fueling of white supremacist grievances. But his departure from office, whether before Jan. 20 or on that day when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, is not enough to solve to deeper problems exposed by the assault, she added.
“Trump ran for president on a vision of America where whiteness is valued at the expense of everything else,” Clinton said. “In the White House, he gave white supremacists, members of the extreme right and conspiracy theorists their most powerful platforms yet, even claiming that there were ‘very fine people’ among the torch-wielding militia members who converged” on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that led to the death of a counter-protester
By the time Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden, she said, “he had whipped a dangerous element of our country into a frenzy.”
She called out Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) for encouraging the insurrectionists, who marched on the Capitol at Trump’s direction to halt the certification of electoral votes ― a strictly procedural requirement preceding Biden’s inauguration.
She urged those three and other lawmakers who joined “in subverting our democracy” to give up their offices. But such departures and the end of Trump’s presidency “won’t remove white supremacy and extremism from America,” Clinton said.
She called on lawmakers to pursue new criminal laws at the federal and state levels that would do more to hold white supremacists accountable and intensify effort to track the activities of extremists such as the ones who stormed the Capitol. She also called on social media companies ― many of which have now banned Trump from their platforms ― to do more to combat violent speech and baseless conspiracy theories.
“The Biden administration will need to address this crisis in all its complexity and breadth, including holding technology platforms accountable, prosecuting all who broke our laws, and making public more intelligence and analysis about domestic terrorism,” she concluded.