Former homeland security secretary: Trump doesn’t quite understand ‘how our democracy is set up’

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had some tough words for Donald Trump on Wednesday when discussing his readiness for the presidency.

“The president’s comments and what comes out of the president’s mouth are so very important,” she said of the recent firestorm over Trump’s suggestion that “Second Amendment people” could help thwart President Hillary Clinton in office.

“The American people need to be focused on what does the president do, and how the president employs that bully pulpit is so very important,” she continued.

Napolitano discussed Trump as part of an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric. The day before, Trump said at a rally that gun rights supporters could possibly keep Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices who would undermine the Second Amendment. Trump’s comments were widely interpreted as either a joke or a quip suggesting violence against the Democratic nominee’s potential administration.

Napolitano, a former Arizona governor, said she could “only speculate that the number of threats or things of that nature have increased” throughout the course of the heated presidential election and that, “unfortunately, rhetoric plays a role. Rhetoric can be fuel to the fire.”

Couric noted that Clinton has also been the subject of her own negative headlines amid this week’s release of emails that raise new questions about the nature of the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s State Department.

Napolitano noted that while she is a Democrat and is openly supporting Clinton for president, “I think she made a mistake in how she set up her email” with a private server for official State Department business. That mistake would continue to be “an Achilles’ heel” for Clinton, she said.

Still, Napolitano urged voters to weigh their questions about Clinton’s judgment “against the entire picture now that we are seeing of a candidate who seems to articulate that he is his own best decision maker, that he knows more about ISIS than the generals do, that he can amend the Constitution … really a lack of understanding about how our democracy is set up, and what would it be like to live under a Trump presidency.”

“I would worry every night about what I would wake up to in the morning about what Trump had said or done,” she said. In contrast, if Clinton were elected, Napolitano said, “I would rest easy at night knowing she was making the kinds of judgments a president is called on to make.”

“I worked with her, I saw how she worked in the White House in the situation room,” she said.

As for whether Napolitano, now president of the University of California system, would return to Washington if offered a position in Clinton’s potential Cabinet, she said, “I don’t play what-ifs.”