An alternative nightmare: What if Hillary had won?
If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election there would be fewer people dead now, but we might be even closer to fascism and revolution.
This article is part of a long series of my thoughts on the role of climate change in history, which interfaces with the collapse of American democracy. For other articles in this series, see here, here, here, and here.
November 8, 2016, election day, was one of the worst days of my life. I was a passionate supporter of Hillary Clinton for President, one of the minority of Americans who actually liked her, and hers was the only political campaign in my life that I actually volunteered for. My husband and I watched the grim results of the election at a local pizza parlor which was a gathering place for Democratic Party politicos. Watching Trump go over the top was tragic and heartbreaking. Although I expected Hillary to win, I’d felt an odd sense of foreboding that day even before the news came down. Walking home that afternoon, before election results started to come in, I witnessed a car crash that happened right in front of me. It’s easy to see that in hindsight as an omen for what was coming.
But after Trump’s victory, indeed the very next day, my historian’s sense kicked in, and I recall thinking, “Well, maybe it’s better we get this over with sooner rather than later.” In that sentence, the word “this,” which I couldn’t even conceptualize at the time, is what I’m writing about now: the end of the American republic. I guess I perceived on some level even then that such a thing was in the cards. Had Hillary been elected in 2016, it wouldn’t have stopped Donald Trump or even for long arrested the slide of the United States toward the termination of its Constitutional democracy. Indeed, it might even have accelerated it. This is not to say that I’m glad Hillary didn’t win. I wish she had. The nightmare we’ve been through under Trump makes us wish for any mitigation, however temporary or imperfect. But, with now 5 years of hindsight, I’m not sure we’d be in much of a different place now than we are in reality.
I do occasionally engage in alternate history. In fact, I have a podcast, called Age of Confusion, which is alternate history (though it’s not about this subject). Let us spin a scenario or two about how history might have unfolded if Hillary, in addition to winning the popular vote in 2016 by 2.7 million, had also come out in the Electoral College, and been inaugurated the 45th President on January 20, 2017.
There is historical precedent for a roughly, if not closely, similar scenario. In 1825, the rancorous Presidential election of the previous year went down to the House of Representatives after none of the four major candidates (Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay) got a majority of electoral votes. John Quincy Adams, often called JQA by historians and pictured in the header of this article, was elected narrowly in a House vote, but it was widely charged that he made a “corrupt bargain” for the Presidency by promising one of the losers, Clay, the spot of Secretary of State. Jackson, a racist war hero and Indian-killing demagogue, had run a populist campaign and secured a plurality of the popular vote. His supporters were outraged, insisted he’d been cheated, and burned for vengeance at the ballot box for when Jackson would run again in 1828, which he did. With a lack of any real allies in Congress, JQA’s Presidency was strangled in its cradle. He couldn’t get a single initiative through Congress, had little political sway on his own, and had to hold the country’s sectional passions together for the rest of a stunted term. He was annihilated when he ran for reelection in 1828 against Jackson. I think Hillary’s term as President—and she would have been a one-term President—would have turned out similarly.
There is absolutely no doubt that, if Donald Trump had emerged as the loser on election night 2016, he would not have accepted the result. He told the country in so many words that he would not. He would’ve cried “voter fraud” and constructed the fiction of Hillary and the Democrats having fraudulently and illegitimately stolen the election from him. The Big Lie of the 2020 election would instead be the Big Lie of the 2016 election, and Trump would have pushed it relentlessly. Trump did not have the political power in early 2017 to instigate the kind of insurrection against Congress that he did in 2021, so I don’t think a January 6-style putsch would have happened to try to decertify Hillary’s official vote tally. But undoubtedly right-wingers would have rioted, probably violently, either on election night, inauguration day, or both. It’s conceivable that there would have been at least a few people dead from this sort of unrest before President Clinton II even decamped from the reviewing stand at the Capitol to relieve Barack Obama at the White House. Trump would have done everything possible to overshadow her inauguration and steal the media coverage for himself. And the Proud Boys would have dutifully provided some fresh corpses that the right wing could play up as martyrs, murdered by the evil Hillary Clinton.
Would the Republican Party in 2017, as we see they have done in 2020-21, backed Trump’s “Big Lie” narrative? Absolutely they would have—I don’t think there’s any question of it. Even “mainstream” Republicans like Mitch McConnell and then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, if they did not directly amplify Trump’s claims of 2016 election fraud, certainly would’ve enabled them and stood by wordlessly. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress in 2017 and it’s doubtful a Hillary victory would have dislodged that. Trump would have brayed loudly for official investigations into his “loss.” Fearing that Trump-aligned candidates would primary them in 2018, Republican leaders probably would have gone along with these calls, and Congress would have held hearings into the 2016 election. Certainly the wave of anti-voter legislation in red states that we’ve seen in 2021 would have occurred, thus fixing the game to ensure Republicans won the midterm elections in 2018.
Reactionary elements on the far right—the same racists, neo-Nazis and misogynists who felt so emboldened by Trump’s victory in our own timeline—would have used “Big Lie 2017” as a rallying cry and recruiting drive. Remember the vicious, bloodthirsty racist thugs who marched on Charlottesville in August 2017? They did that when Trump won. If he lost, these miscreants would have found the following of an African-American President by a female and feminist President entirely unacceptable. The sexist and misogynist backlash against a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been even uglier and probably better-organized than the racist backlash against the Barack Obama presidency in 2009. MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) of every stripe, from Incels to MGTOWs, Red Pillers and PUAs, would have gone even more mainstream than they did during the real-life Trump presidency. Mass shootings targeting women, the LGBT community and people of color might eclipse the terrible zenith they’ve reached in the real timeline. Without Congress being willing to pass meaningful gun limitations, Hillary would be as powerless to stop these massacres as Biden is today. Misogynist violence is at horrifying levels in real life; it would be no different if Hillary had been in office. Individual women and their families continue to pay the ultimate price for this sickening hatred.
Politically, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a nightmare. The Supreme Court would have been only one of the Hobson’s choices that Republicans would have forced her to face. For at least the first part of Hillary’s Presidency, Mitch McConnell would have followed through on the threat he made in 2016 to ensure that she did not make any Supreme Court appointments. As you recall, Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, and his seat would have been held open for the entirety of Hillary’s presidency. However, McConnell would have had a tough choice to make if Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, as he did in real life, in July 2018. Leaving his seat open too would mean the Court would have a 4-3 liberal majority: Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsburg vs. Roberts, Thomas and Alito.
McConnell, a craven and evil genius utterly without a shred of human decency, would under no circumstances have allowed this to occur. He might have pretended to compromise with Hillary and allowed her to put up one justice, perhaps with a vague promise of allowing a second later, but he wouldn’t have allowed her to fill both vacancies at once. Hillary would have gone through several failed nominations before finding someone centrist (translation: conservative and anti-woman) enough to be acceptable to McConnell, who would then claim Hillary had “betrayed” him with something or other and then refuse to allow the other seat to be filled. The result would be a Supreme Court of 8 justices that would deadlock, 4-4, on all major decisions from 2018 through the end of Hillary’s term, but with a vacant seat that Republicans could hold in check for the time of Trump’s eventual victory in 2020. McConnell would accept a non-functioning Court over one with a liberal majority any day of the week. Hillary would lose either way.
President Clinton II would also have faced numerous crises in foreign policy, chiefly instigated by the one man in the world who hates her more than Donald Trump does, that being Vladimir Putin. (I teach an online class on the history and background of Putin, and I think I’m on solid ground here). Putin, enraged that his expensive attempts to put Trump in the White House had failed and chafing under the indignity of having to pretend to treat a woman as the leader of a co-equal superpower, would have needled, challenged and stymied Hillary at every turn. A successful Hillary election might have led, at least at the executive level, to a real investigation of Russian meddling in 2016 and some sort of diplomatic repercussions. Putin would retaliate. He would have used Brexit even more skillfully to split the European and NATO alliances, gone on a rampage in Ukraine and perhaps the Baltic states, and done everything possible to play China and the U.S. against each other. Hillary might have gotten on well with Theresa May, who was still UK Prime Minister in 2017, but when Boris Johnson came to power, the U.S.-UK alliance would have been severely strained. At least Hillary would have observed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama. She would not have had the political courage to end the war in Afghanistan.
In terms of domestic politics, a Hillary Presidency would not have unified the Democratic Party—it would likely have fractured it. The rage of the “Berniebros” was still white-hot in 2017 and the media wouldn’t be able to resist painting Democrats as “splintering” between traditional (Hillary) and progressive (Bernie Sanders) wings, thus insuring a self-fulfilling prophecy. Progressives in all parts of the Democratic Party would have lustily crucified Hillary for being too hawkish on foreign policy, too cozy with Wall Street, too slow on climate change and insufficiently committed to police reform and racial justice issues, especially after the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor deaths. With blood in the water as the 2020 election season got going, Bernie Sanders might have tried to mount a bid to unseat her as the Democratic nominee. He couldn’t have done it, but an insurgent Sanders candidacy in 2020 would have stuck yet another knife in Hillary’s back and ensured her defeat to Trump, if it wasn’t ensured already.
As to the coronavirus pandemic, there’s no question in my mind that Hillary Clinton would’ve handled it responsibly, competently and effectively. She would have listened to the scientists from day one and moved heaven and Earth to fast-track a vaccine program. But no one would ever know it. In the absence of the horrific COVID-19 bloodbath we’ve lived through in real life, the best-case scenario for the pandemic—say, 30,000 American deaths, less than 5% of the true number of dead so far—would have, in context, looked like and been spun as a ghastly and shocking failure. Republicans, and especially Trump, would have branded the number of deaths across Hillary’s forehead. The term “Hillary Virus” would be a hashtag, a meme, and eventually an embodiment of the zeitgeist. Even if she managed to hold down the number of American coronavirus deaths to 30,000, Republicans would have painted her as the biggest and most callous butcher in American history since the Civil War. Throughout all of 2020, Trump and his supporters would keep #HillaryVirus and #HillaryLiedPeopleDied trending every single day. McConnell and Ryan would eventually yield to calls for her impeachment. Even after 2018 there’d still be enough Democrats in the Senate to prevent her from being removed, but she, not Trump, would go down as the third U.S. President to be impeached, roping her to Bill as “the most corrupt couple in American history.” If Hillary’s approval rating was north of 25% in late summer 2020, it would have been a miracle.
Then would come the election and its bloody aftermath. Despite having served as President as best she could under nightmare circumstances, Hillary would have been utterly vaporized at the polls in the 2020 election. American voters, battered by coronavirus, terrified by Putin, ravaged by recession and radicalized by Fox News, Alex Jones, Facebook and the Proud Boys, would have taken a chance on Donald Trump in far greater numbers in alternate-2020 than they did in real-life 2016. He would have swept into office on a Republican landslide that would have the added power of validating the nascent claim to the Presidency that he would (still) be insisting was stolen from him in 2016. A Trump White House would have the political mandate to prosecute Hillary Clinton, possibly even for murder or treason, and they could point to the piles of coronavirus bodies as her victims. Chants of “Lock her up!” could have become a literal reality. A vaccine, set in the works by Hillary’s administration, would not be ready for roll-out until early 2021, after Trump had been inaugurated. Then he would take the credit for “curing” COVID. On January 21, Trump would send two right-wing nominees to the Supreme Court, one to replace Scalia and the other Ginsburg, who we presume would still have died in September 2020.
Trump’s Presidency would have unfolded in all its grim, fascistic glory—except it could have been worse. He would have entered office with a landslide election result, a political mandate, a lock on both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, his arch-nemesis in jail, and the winds of history at his back. That could be where we are right now, in late October 2021, if Hillary had won.
This kind of thinking leaves me conflicted. I think Hillary Clinton is a decent person who would have made an excellent President at least under more or less normal circumstances. It’s hard for me to say, with the nightmare of our American collapse still ongoing, that this alternate timeline is necessarily “worse” than whatever we’re headed for as events did unfold. I don’t regret my work on the Hillary campaign or my support for her. But her victory might have triggered a nightmare equal to the one we’ve lived through. It causes me nothing but anxiety to have to say that. These are the times we live in.
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