Hillary Clinton apparently cannot stop talking about Donald Trump, and her latest comments have raised some serious eyebrows.
Appearing on Kara Swisher’s “Pivot” podcast, the two-time presidential candidate offered her advice for the next Democratic president. Her core recommendation was blunt: get rid of every Trump-era appointee still lingering anywhere in the federal government.
“Get rid of all the holdovers,” Clinton said. “Do not let anybody hang around in some small office somewhere who can literally subvert your program and you don’t even know the person is there.”
Read that carefully. This is the same Hillary Clinton who spent years insisting the “deep state” was a paranoid right-wing fantasy. The same person who argued career civil servants were nonpartisan professionals whose institutional knowledge deserved respect. The same voice who called Trump’s efforts to bring the executive branch under tighter presidential control a threat to democracy.
Now she is openly advising Democrats to conduct a systematic political purge of federal employees.
As originally reported, Clinton went even further, warning that Trump would try to move people from political positions into civil service roles specifically to protect them from future removals. Her advice to Democrats was to hunt those people down.
“People are going to have to be really searching,” she said, “to make sure they’re not going to be literally subverted from within the government.”
The irony is staggering. Democrats spent years attacking Trump’s Schedule F executive order, which made it easier to remove civil servants who obstructed presidential directives, calling it an assault on the nonpartisan professional workforce. Clinton is now recommending the exact same thing, just with different targets.
The hypocrisy does not stop there. Democrats have consistently dismissed accounts of deep-state obstruction as conspiracy theory. They attacked whistleblowers who described career officials deciding which presidential directives were legitimate and which could be quietly undermined. They pushed back on reports of political maneuvering inside agencies like the FBI and NSA.
Clinton just confirmed the underlying logic of all of it. She is telling the next Democratic president to build a more deliberate, more organized version of exactly what critics said was already happening, and to remove anyone inside the government who might not play along.
That is the deep state, articulated openly, as explicit Democratic Party strategy, on a podcast, by the woman who lost to Donald Trump in 2016 and still cannot seem to move past it.
She did not call for a merit-based civil service. She did not call for nonpartisan professionalism. She called for a loyalty sweep across the federal workforce, framed as a defensive necessity.
The irony of Hillary Clinton demanding political purges while once mocking concerns about government insiders working against elected leaders is not subtle. It is just being ignored.