Bill Clinton was the president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. During his term, Republicans in Congress largely abandoned institutional forbearance. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, they started overusing the filibuster, investigated Clinton on dubious grounds, and impeached him for a personal scandal that didn’t meet the traditional impeachment standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
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Bill Clinton Character Timeline in How Democracies Die
The timeline below shows where the character Bill Clinton appears in How Democracies Die. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: The Great Republican Abdication
...democracy. He refused to promise to accept the 2016 election results, and he accused Hillary Clinton supporters of widespread voter fraud without any evidence. No president has questioned American democracy like...
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...claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and called for imprisoning Hillary Clinton.
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Fourth, Trump supports punishing his opponents and critics. He proposed prosecuting Hillary Clinton for unspecified crimes and threatened to change libel laws and sue the media.
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...have done everything possible to keep Trump out of power and preserve democracy—including supporting Hillary Clinton. Endorsing opponents to save democracy isn’t unprecedented: it happened in Austria in 2016 and France...
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If prominent Republicans had endorsed Clinton, they very well might have swung the election. Unfortunately, they chose to pretend that it...
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Chapter 7: The Unraveling
...During his rise, politicians started viewing the other side as immoral and illegitimate. During Bill Clinton’s administration, Republican senators dramatically expanded use of the filibuster and started investigating presidential scandals that...
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...of stopping Democrats any way they could. They politicized the impeachment process by impeaching President Clinton without meeting the traditional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” After Gingrich left office, House...
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