Michael DAntonio - The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton

Theres not one shred of evidence that President Trump has done anything wrong. @GrahamLedger One America News. So true, a total Witch Hunt-All started illegally by Crooked Hillary Clinton.

DONALD TRUMP, VIA TWITTER, MARCH 10, 2019

By March of 2019, two years into his first term, the forty-fifth president of the United States had issued more than two hundred social media attacks on the woman he had defeated in the 2016 election. His allies in Congress and across the country had joined in the vilification, barking Hillary Clintons name every time events imperiled their man in the White House. Days after Trumps March 10 tweet, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina took to the floor of the United States Senate to draw attention to Clintons mishandling of emails years before. Any American out there who did what Secretary Clinton did, youd be in jail now, announced Graham. The question I want to know is, does anybody other than me believe that?

The spur for Grahams question was not a groundswell of public demand for the former secretary of state to be imprisoned. Voters were little interested in this issue. Instead, Graham was seeking to deflect attention from the imminent completion of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Russian meddling in the same election that had installed Trump in the Oval Office. Having joined a crowd of rabidly pro-Trump congressional Republicans, the senator uttered her name as if it were part of an evil-eye curse intended to save the president.

Graham, like Trump, had come to regard the Mueller probe as a destructive enterprise with little public purpose. The president went much further, bellowing the words witch hunt hundreds of times and castigating his critics in the crudest terms. Especially fixated on women who opposed him, Trump was venomous in his treatment of Representative Maxine Waters, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and upstart congressional newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. However, time and again, he resurrected his favorite enemy, Hillary Clinton, as if she possessed powers that made her more (or less) than human and thus someone to be feared despite her retirement from politics.

The Hillary-as-enemy reflex was so much a part of Trumpism that true believers went to ridiculous extremes as they imitated the president. In the summer of 2019, when the wealthy sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell, a Trump appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development suggested that somehow his death had been Hillary Clintons fault. This theme circulated widely among conspiracy theorists who speculated that she was to blame for numerous deaths.

In truth, Clinton had always been regarded by her opponents as more monster than person, and they had devoted forty years to rendering her evil. Unprecedented in American history, this concerted and continuous attack had established her as a kind of devil in the hearts of millions who had been persuaded that she was the embodiment of every negative stereotype that could be mustered against a powerful woman. She was, in this calculus, not just a complex and flawed human being but, rather, scheming, untrustworthy, violent, greedy, cruel, and even murderous. As such, it wasnt enough for her to be defeated in an election. Instead, she had to be so humiliated and then obliterated that even history would forget her. Officials in Texas actually voted to remove her from history lessons taught in the states schools but reinstated her after a public uproar.

The Texas school boards decision was obviously intended to shape the minds of children who would not vote or even join adult society for years to come. By then, it would seem, Clinton and perhaps the whole notion of women asserting direct claims for power would be forgotten, at least in Texas. However, in the short term, the president and others needed her in the way that ancient peoples needed ghosts and goblins and devils. Demons are unconscious projections of the insecurities and negative impulses of their creators. They are heaped with sins and shortcomings so that we could feel pure.

As the least qualified major-party presidential candidate in modern times, Donald Trumps campaign depended on saddling his opponents with the traits that marked himthey were, in his words, crooked liarsand fomenting popular rage against them. When he learned that federal authorities were investigating links between his campaign and Russian operatives, he began saying he was the target of a witch hunt. In just his first two years in office, Trump used the term more than one hundred times. As was so often the case with this president, his argument reduced a serious issue to an absurd and distracting slogan that was also a lie. Also true to form was the fact that with his complaint, Trump claimed to be victimized by an awful method that he himself had practiced to great effect.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump had used an arsenal of misogyny that included threats, rage, innuendo, smears, and lies against Hillary Clinton. As the Electoral College gave him the victory, despite a three-million-vote deficit at the ballot box, Trump completed the campaign of destruction that others had long waged. This effort, which is the most overlooked part of Clintons biography, took place in the context of a backlash against the womens rights movement and a well-documented turn toward a more vitriolic politics practiced by hyper-partisans.

Among the first of these extremists was a Republican congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich, who, beginning in the 1970s, mainstreamed the vilification of the opposition as traitors and thugs out to destroy our country. In notes he made in the 1970s and 1980s, Gingrich showed himself to be a proto-Trump as he wrote that his side should be willing to be unpopular, uncouth and have no shame. For example, he thought the GOP should try to exploit anti-queer sentiment in the black community.

In addition to encouraging activists to be nasty, Gingrich turned the old adage that says all politics is local on its head to make all politics national. This approach, which involved transforming the other sides leaders from opponents into enemies, made it easier for voters to form strong bonds with their political team and then join what Gingrich called a war for power.

For a few years, Gingrich was regarded as a sideshow member of Congress, and his speeches reinforced this status. Among the choicest examples was his claim that under Democrats, we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children. He said Speaker of the House Thomas P. Tip ONeill may not understand freedom versus slavery and that in contesting the election results in one congressional district Democrats resembled Nazis. As he used this talk to claim the pure center of the GOP, Gingrich moved from the fringe to a place of influence. By 1985, he would lead a coterie of like-minded House members and declare, Im unavoidable. I represent real power.