The Precipice of Democracy: A Perspective on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Run

By S.R. Ross

Why did the United States of America go through such a traumatic election in 2016?
This book traces what led up to the contest between Hillary Clinton and her opponent and how its outcome continues to have repercussions today.
The author dares to ask, “How can we ensure our country continues as a thriving democracy?” It also considers questions such as:
• Did Trump really attempt to stay in power by assembling a mob on Capitol Hill, and if so, what does that say about him?
• Do Trump and his followers remain a threat to democracy?
• If democracy is supplanted, what can we expect to take its place?
The 2016 election was unlike any before in America: A female candidate graced the election arena and her opponent openly requested foreign interference. With so many democratic ideals having been broken, can we still hold onto our status as a democracy?
Find out how close America, the beacon of democracy, came to losing its status and what we can do to safeguard our freedom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663255280

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Copyright © 2023 S.R. Ross.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-5526-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5527-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5528-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023914930

iUniverse rev. date: 11/21/2023

Contents

Thanks

Author’s Note

Note to Readers

What Happened

Introduction

Controlling Anger

Anger

Salvation

January 6, 2022

January 6, 2021

Four Years of HO

Capitol Hill, Standing

Spillover Effect

How to Keep Your Country

Losing the Race

Well-Behaved Women

First Lady

Likelihood Function

The Sun Came Up

Knowing the Clintons

My Mantra for Life

Two Stars Align in 2016

High School US Government Course?

Your Opponent

Election Eve

A World Where Hillary Won in 2016

Speculative Musings to Ponder—We’ll Never Know

Acceptance

Balance in the World

Cafeteria Talk: Watch the Drama

The White House Coup

Supreme Court and Military Court

HO’s Brain Can’t Comprehend

Signs of Dementia

Smart

The Shame of Not Winning

A Take

True Nature Revealed

Suspicious of Mike Pence

You Are a Winner

Predictions

Email Controversy

Pandemic COVID 2019

2020 and 2021

New Normal Times Due to Pandemic

COVID and the Election

To the Unvaccinated

Your Opponent Infected

Memes

The End

For the Better

To Your Opponent and His Followers

Timeline Leading to January 6—

HO Was Just Enough Crazy

Stereotypes

The Royal Flush in HO’s White House

HO Takes the Fifth

January 6 Committee Findings: Looking Back

Lessons from the Past

Hillary

Conclusions: Lessons from Your Defeat

Conclusions: To the Reader

Appendix

Abbreviations

Works Cited

For my family and all the freedom-loving folks on this earth!

We are trying to celebrate freedom, or basically what

we earned in 1776 and have celebrated ever since—

the beginning of the peaceful transition of power.

Thanks

I would like to thank the three principal figures I discuss in the book—Hillary, Hillary’s Opponent in 2016, and Biden. Without these actors and their role in the US presidency, we wouldn’t have seen how forces interact to make America. Nor would we have glimpsed the attempted coup that failed due to the heroic efforts of the many brave officers. I want to thank all the amazing officers who put their lives on the line that day, January 6th, 2021.

I would like to thank my family, without whom this book wouldn’t be possible. Thanks, RVA. I couldn’t have done it without you, Buddy.

This book is dedicated to my parents and family.

Author’s Note

I heard it. I saw it. I read it. I felt it. I remember it. Some of this book is my own feelings, analysis, and memory of what I heard, saw, and read. The remainder of this story stems from conversations with people—family, peers, and friends. I use HO many times as an acronym because Hillary’s Opponent seems too long. I even use Hopponent as short for Hillary’s Opponent.

So your opponent = HO = Hillary’s Opponent = Hopponent.

This book is addressed to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This book is trying to figure out why you lost to your opponent, Hopponent. What kind of a man is he, and what would he have done if he had lost to you? We can never tell exactly what would have come to pass, but we can imagine it, especially given what we know about his reaction to losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

It may be easier to extrapolate a set of data and actions, and infer unknown values from trends since we have more known data. So, given what we now know about the days and events leading up to the Biden inauguration, we can infer what he would do if he had lost to you.

Thinking about that, my goal became to find out how I could help.

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All that glisters is not gold,

Often have you heard that told.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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Note to Readers

While this book is addressed to Hillary, I think many of you reading this will see yourselves in this analysis as well. Have you spent much of the past six years wondering how America became so divided and enraged? Have you been watching more news, or doomscrolling social media late at night in bed, pouring bad thing after bad thing into your consciousness? Doomsday scenarios? At a certain point after this manic, intractable behavior, we must stop and stay still for a minute and ask ourselves, How did we get here?

We are going to address the causes of today’s political landscape beginning in the 2016 presidential election, and consider modern history’s effect on the present through a discussion of the Clintons, the Bushes, and many others who left their mark on America’s political growth.

Tracing the course of a process can help us not only identify root causes but also chart a trajectory. Where are we going from here? How can current American politics move forward with massive forces pulling in opposite directions? Can we remain united? Can we prevent a breakdown of our country from happening again and cultivate well-being for all Americans—rich and poor, Republicans, Democrats, and independents?

If you have ever found yourself staring at a dazzling screen at an ungodly hour pondering such questions, this book will help address these thoughts and hopefully help the quality of your sleep. While you should not trust anyone who says they can tell you the future, the least any of us can do is make sure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

What Happened

As the days went by, November turned into December, and that horrible, no good, very bad time came to a close. I began to discover my gratitude. I felt the good effects of all that walking and sleep; I was getting calmer and stronger.

Hillary Rodham Clinton detailed her journey after the 2016 election in her book, What Happened (Clinton, 34). It took her less than a month to shake off the weight of the loss. Nice. And she discovered gratitude. Amazing. But that jolt of defeat has not yet calmed HO down. He still continues his unabashed lies about a fake win. Did your opponent thank you for his presidency?

Good exercise and sleep can help you feel relaxed, calm, and strong. It’s a fact of life, so walk.

It’s perfect that you got back to religion and sought help from authors and past presidents to help you cope with this. Good for you. It doesn’t matter how, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I liked the way you handled the results of the 2016 election: long walks, pets, breathing, yoga, family, children, grandchildren. Exercise all six hundred fifty muscles in your body and your mind. They all help every bit. The support system from family and friends can be a set of great tools to help. Your daughter telling you to let the kids help you if they want to was touching. It was a great piece of advice that you followed and shared.

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People need to deep breathe, compromise, iterate, regress, and progress.

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Introduction

Dear Hillary,

Everyone talked a lot about your book, What Happened, before and after it was published. Your run in 2016 was during a one-of-a-kind election. Polls foresaw one thing, and something else happened, causing you and millions of others to question what happened. Yes, you are right to ask and investigate, but this one has a simple answer in the Gita, which is a guiding work of Hindu philosophy. This will be discussed later.

I was not going to write this book. No. It was never on my mind to write anything on politics. Not even after What Happened was published. I didn’t even read it until the year 2021. The driving factor was the shock and horror of the events of January 6, 2021, when I started to think: why did he do that?

I’m writing this because democracy is important. We came so close to losing it. We can’t let that happen again ever. Presidents can come and go and that is the beauty of our nation, an experiment called the United States of America for the past two hundred–plus years. We want to see new faces, new changes, new blood, new hairdos, new agendas, new hopes and dreams, and of course new first ladies. This is not easy. India and Pakistan both became free from the British, but very quickly Pakistan went into a coup mode and has never fully recovered from it. Elections are held everywhere, but there are very many illiberal democracies, where the will of the people is not obeyed by those in power.

I remember the night on April 4, 1979, when Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, was assassinated by hanging in Rawalpindi after a coup that occurred two years earlier on July 5, 1977. I was little, but I listened to the news in all sadness. We listened on the radio, as we did not have TV at the time, but I did experience the news in real time over the airwaves. My father had the BBC on in the verandah, and everyone around him listened in silence. It was no fun. I did not think of it much more, since it did not directly impact my family. We were not in Pakistan and had nothing to do with Pakistan. Coups were happening in many countries and under many different situations. My mind reels as I think back to January 6, 2021. Was I time-traveling? A little kid listening to a military coup in a nearby country? Could I have seen it coming to my life? But now when the thought of it came so close to me and my own country, within miles of my house, I had to write about it. I felt it, I experienced it. I would have dreaded the thought that this could happen so close to my own backyard.

Then late in December 2021, with the January 6 anniversary approaching in a few days, I thought I should write about it so that this doesn’t happen again. The big question is could January 6 have happened if Hillary had won? Could HO have mounted an insurrection in 2017, or something similar to what happened in 2021, if he had not won? We can probably assume that he might have reacted somewhat belligerently, definitely not with the grace and respect of any of his predecessors who lost. But then if he runs again in 2024 and loses, will he do the same and initiate a coup? If so, should we bar him from ever running again. especially after that kind of maniacal behavior?

This book is necessary because the country has been hijacked by a man taking us in the wrong direction. We’ll call him Hillary’s Opponent, or Hopponent for short or HO for even shorter. (Time is a valuable commodity.)

What has he proven so far? That he was impeached twice and can’t be counted upon to act rationally in the event of a loss. In 2021 on the sixth of January, his motivation to hold on to power was revealed, even after a significant defeat was dealt to him by Biden. Fourteen days before inauguration on January 20, HO did this in a desperate attempt to hang on to what power he had remaining, so he could be in the White House and deny the winner what he deserved.

The attempted coup was a complete U-turn toward the colonial ages when we defended our land from attack by all of Europe looking to get a piece of the pie. The Quasi-War, the Revolutionary War, struggles with France, England, Spain—you name it. If HO’s attempted coup had not been thwarted, many parts of the country would be plagued with divisiveness and turmoil. Divide and rule would be cultivated as a norm during HO’s happy hours.

I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like. Russia and China have already been flexing their muscles. So write away, folks. Use your pen as a tool to say something.

This book is also meant to reach out to anyone who has lost and has not met their goals, to anyone who was rejected from a college they wanted to attend: It’s okay. Don’t worry. Stop fretting, and there are other better options for you. Don’t give up. Never give up. Continue doing what you set out to do. You will achieve greatness. There is no doubt about it, no matter how long it takes.

Take a moment to reflect on what’s important to you, your unique abilities, and your great strengths. That will help you positively impact your community and the world around you. Karma yoga says, "Do your best and accept the result as prasad (God’s blessing). It may not be what you were looking for, but it is the best for you."

To really understand what happened in 2016 we need to go forward to 2020, 2021, and even 2022. Otherwise we will not be able to understand who your opponent was, is, and will continue to be.

Here is a perspective: my view, my take.

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This land is your land, this land is my land …

No, no, no. No. Just mine, says HO, and starts the coup process.

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If you are angry, take a deep breath, take a cold shower, or if you can, go for a walk or a run.

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Controlling Anger

You are a woman, Hillary. Angry? Maybe.

Was your opponent an angry man? Surely.

He was a white man born out of the jokes of Obama. But angry? It wasn’t clear then that he was an angry man. Now we know for sure after 2021. Before that he was just the host of The Apprentice, until the show was kicked off NBC.

You are a woman, Hillary. Angry? Maybe.

So what was he angry about? Angry about his piss-poor planning? Everyone heard that he spent many lazy hours just watching TV and making calls to friends and other lawyers to overturn the elections.

This angry man called for a mob to attack the Capitol so that electoral vote counting and certification could be stopped. If that counting stopped, he would be the next confirmed coup-president. That same day, a little-known hero emerged. He had been belittled by his president before this and called names. He is still belittled by his president. But that day he rose up high from an underground loading dock, defended the Constitution, and declared Biden victorious. Hats off to you, Mike. Did that make your opponent angry? Surely.

So where did that anger come from? The loss of the election to Biden? Ah, that brings up another fact. Biden is a white man too. Is he an angry man? Sure. He is angry because he has had to deal with so much grief and loss. But he is a nice man. He has a golden heart and a wonderful mind.

You see, everyone has anger. Even my cat hisses and claws things when she is angry. Anger is animal nature. But people can control their anger every day and not behave the way your opponent did. We must control these feelings for our society to function. It is even more important for leaders to control themselves to set a good example for the rest of their constituents.

The Gita says that anger stems from frustrations, which stem from unfulfilled desire. So what is desire? Something similar to winning the election at any cost. So it’s lust and/or greed. When the British invaded the US, India, and other countries, they were motivated by greed for more gold and spices, and many forms of anger and lust were on display. The Trojan War was fought over a lust for Helen. Your opponent took a big risk over his lust for the presidency and frenzy for power. And because of that crazed lust, any chance he had of being looked upon favorably by history slipped down the drains of Capitol Hill.

The Gita says that anger stems from frustrations, which stem from unfulfilled desire.

The Gita teaches us that if one can recognize the cause and effect of anger, they can easily control it and instead do better for themselves and others. The causes of anger rarely hurt us as much as the consequence (Gita 16.21).

The Bible, the Quran, and the Gita have this similar message.

Anger in the Bible

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. (Ephesians 4:31)

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

Anger in the Quran

The Prophet of Allah said, When one of you becomes angry while standing, he should sit down. If the anger leaves him, well and good; otherwise he should lie down. (6)

The Prophet said, If one of you becomes angry then he should stay silent. (5)

I used to tell my father about some of my problems. Three days before my father died, I told him about someone I know that was always angry, and he said, "So what? Let it be.’’

He was sick, but I didn’t know he would die. So I continued, "They say blah blah blah. And he said, It’s their job to be angry; let it go. You do your job."

When someone would come to the house angry, my grandma would make sharbat for them, a sweet drink. She then proceeded to make great food and feed them with