Hillary Clinton calls out Donald Trump and his threat to American democracy in an essay published by The Atlantic on Sunday.
The essay was adapted from the soon-to-be-published afterword from Clinton’s 2017 memoir about the 2016 presidential election, titled What Happened.
In the essay, called “American Democracy is in Crisis,” Clinton lays out five reasons why American democracy is in crisis.
“Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track,” Clinton wrote. “I think that may be the point — to confound us, so it’s harder to keep our eye on the ball.
“The ball, of course, is protecting American democracy. As citizens, that’s our most important charge. And right now, our democracy is in crisis.”
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Clinton then lists the five “main fronts” of Trump’s assault on the U.S.’s democracy, which include his assault on the rule of law, the legitimacy of elections being in doubt, Trump’s war on truth and reason, Trump’s “breathtaking corruption,” and Trump’s inability to unite all Americans.
In her reasoning, Clinton draws on what Trump has said over his time as president, such as Trump telling The New York Times, “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department,” or his comments of African and Haitian immigrants coming from “s**thole countries.”
Clinton also tallies Trump’s lies, citing the Washington Post’s count of Trump making 5,000 false or misleading claims while in office to date.
However, Clinton doesn’t lay all the blame on Trump for her opinion of the U.S.’s current state, but writes that “decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump,” and “Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office.”
To offer hope, Clinton calls for a “massive turnout” in the 2018 midterms, as well as for an end to the Electoral College that ultimately led to her loss in the 2016 election.
Clinton’s essay comes as members of both parties attempt to mobilize voters before the November midterm elections. Barack Obama went on the campaign trail earlier in September and offered his own criticism of Trump at the University of Illinois, asking how hard it could be to say Nazis are bad.