Hillary Clinton predicted Tuesday that President Donald Trump will "wholesale fire people" in the White House and become increasingly unaccountable if Democrats don't check his power by winning a majority of seats in the House or Senate in the November midterm elections.
Clinton made the remarks during the former secretary of state's appearance on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."
"What I worry about, Rachel, is that after this election this president is going to wholesale fire people," Clinton said. " ... And if we [Democrats] don’t have one or both houses of Congress in place he will be even more uncontrollable and unaccountable. He will fire people in the White House, he will fire people in this administration who he thinks are crossing him, questioning him, undermining him.”
Clinton, who ran the State Department during part of the Obama administration, said an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times was "horrifying" and raised the likelihood that Trump might try to purge his staff of those he suspects of working against him.
The writer of the Sept. 5 op-ed, identified as a senior White House official, said there was a "resistance" inside the Trump administration that at times has worked "to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."
The previous day, journalist Bob Woodward's book, "Fear: Trump in the White House," reported that top aides sometimes secretly thwarted the president. In one case, according to the book, then-adviser Gary Cohn swiped from Trump's desk a letter that sought to withdraw the United States from a trade pact with South Korea.
Clinton previously predicted during a Sept. 14, 2017, appearance on "The Rachel Maddow Show" that the "people around" the president will "have to be our first line of defense against him doing something that could have serious repercussions."
She said a new firing spree by Trump was her "prediction for tonight."
On Tuesday, Clinton concluded, "At some point the American public has to say, number one, I may disagree with Democrats, I may disagree with the direction of this administration, but one thing I believe in is we have to have checks and balances — that’s why we have to vote for Democrats in November."
