Partway through the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, the president and his Republican allies focused so much attention on Hillary Clinton that she started joking about it. “It appears they don’t know I’m not president,” the former secretary of state said during a book event in Chicago.
Partway through the first year of Trump’s second term, the joke lingers for a reason. Take this report in The Hill, for example, from earlier this week:
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said he made referrals to the Justice Department for former Obama administration officials following the release of intelligence information about the 2016 election. Ratcliffe said former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey could all face charges relating to what he called a ‘hoax’ about the election.
As part of the same exchange, Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked about the possibility of Clinton being prosecuted, and the brazenly partisan CIA director left that door wide open.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe leaves the door open to the Trump administration prosecuting Hillary Clinton for treason
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-27T14:38:52.021Z
A day later, when a conservative media host suggested that Clinton, among others, should be sent to a detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin replied, “Let’s hope they prosecute.”
The day after that, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, turned his attention to alleged “thumb drives” that he believes contains “unreviewed” information about the “Clinton email scandal.”
What’s more, there’s no reason to focus on just the last few days. A week ago, Tulsi Gabbard, the troubled director of national intelligence, appeared in the White House press briefing room and pointed to alleged “high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary’s ‘psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers.”
Soon after, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas appeared on Newsmax and insisted that Clinton “was on tranquilizers … and craving for all the power she could get.”
Because if there’s one thing power-hungry people do, it’s abuse tranquilizers, right? But let’s not forget Trump, who, over the last two weeks, has falsely accused Clinton of partnering with Barack Obama in a “treasonous” conspiracy related to the 2016 election, which came on the heels of the incumbent Republican president claiming that Clinton was somehow one of the co-authors of the Epstein files. To be sure, all of this is hysterical nonsense that even the most knee-jerk partisans should recognize as unserious, but in 2025 — more than 12 years after Clinton left public office — Republicans have apparently struggled to turn other Democratic leaders into villainous caricatures, and so they’re stuck peddling tired absurdities about the former secretary of state, just as they’ve done for the past few decades. Old habits, in other words, die hard.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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