(The Hill) – Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said she will not run for president again.
“No, no,” Clinton said when asked by CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell she would ever run for a second time.
“But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we have a president who respects our democracy and the rule of law and upholds our institutions,” Clinton continued.
Clinton said former President Trump would not fit in that category and that if he runs again “he should be soundly defeated.”
“It should start in the Republican Party,” Clinton said. “Grow a backbone, stand up to this guy.”
Trump, who defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, has been teasing another run for president in 2024 and polls show he has a good shot of clinching the Republican nomination.
Clinton has said that she would endorse President Biden if he runs for reelection the same year — which has repeatedly said he plans to do — saying that he would be “the person most likely to win.”
“Joe Biden beat in a huge landslide victory in the popular vote Donald Trump. I think that says a lot,” Clinton said in a conversation with NBC News anchor Yamiche Alcindor in late June.
On CBS, Clinton shot down any comparisons between her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state and the recent discovery of classified materials at Trump’s Florida home, saying the two situations are “really different” from one another.
“I think it’s a really different comparison to what’s going on here,” Clinton said of her own skirmish with the FBI compared with Trump’s current situation. “When it appears that the justice department and the FBI have been incredibly patient, quiet, careful, until they finally apparently thought that national security was at stake.”