Former Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently raised eyebrows again by saying that the Republican Party is showing “too many characteristics” of “authoritarianism.”
“The problem is, if you go through the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, you see too many characteristics unfortunately on our Republican side,” Clinton told the hosts of ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday.
“My most fervent hope is that Republicans themselves will begin to reject all of that verbally, vocally, in their voting, and kind of reconstitute the Republican Party to where it used to be and not the party of [former US President Donald] Trump, which I think is very dangerous to the country,” she said.
The comments came just weeks after US President Joe Biden formally shut down the so-called ‘Disinformation Governance Board,’ whose creation sparked both widespread alarm and mockery, and coincided with Biden’s push to label Trump supporters “semi-fascists” and a threat to national security.
But it’s a charge Clinton has levied at the Republican Party for some time now.
Calling members of the GOP “domestic enemies… who [don't] believe in our democracy,” the former first lady secretary of state claimed last year that her Republican opponents were effectively pawns of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Sadly,” she said, “what we've seen over the last 4 years, and particularly since our election in 2020, is that we have people within our own country who are doing Putin's work ... to sow distrust, to sow divisiveness, to give aid and comfort to those in our country who, for whatever reason, are being not only disruptive but very dangerous."
And in 2018, Clinton labeled the Trump administration an “authoritarian regime” and called the 2016 election “a case study in the weaponization of false information and outright lies against our democracy” – and one which, she claimed, marked “the beginning of the end of freedom.”