I think their true deep hatred began with the Bush/Gore fiasco. It has gotten progressively worse, and then Donald J. Trump, a businessman, not a politician had the unmitigated gall to run and win against Hillary! The outrage, the deep hatred was they only way they could go after that.

Oh, it way predates Bush II. They passionately hated Nixon and Reagan and to a somewhat lesser extent Bush I. (They didn’t hate Bush I as much because he was amenable to some of their ideas, and they could overcome him easily because of it.)

Bush II and Trump do have some things in common driving hate, though. In both cases, the Left could tell themselves after 2000 and 2016 that they were illegitimate, that they only won because of a SCOTUS ruling and the Electoral College. When Bush II led the GOP to a surprise victory in 2002 (the GOP actually gained Congressional seat in an off-year election), it drove them madder, and then Bush rubbed salt in the wound by leading the GOP to yet a third upset win in 2004, with a popular majority. (If Bush had not allowed himself to be sidetracked into the Business Agenda after 2004, he might have had further wins in 2006.)

Trump repeated this maddening pattern by coming back in 2024 to win a substantial popular vote victory. So far, he’s avoided Bush II’s post 2004 errors.

You don’t think the attempted impeachment of Nixon didn’t have a role to play? That is where this all started. Politics has always been dirty, it is its nature, but getting Nixon to resign was a big step, and it made the Democrats feel they were were blessed. Woodward and Bernstein were made heroes, which in itself corrupted the media.

No, it didn’t start there, but that’s where it both ratcheted up seriously and stalled. The Nixon impeachment worked as a partisan tool, but it also made future impeachments harder once it became clear that the motives had been low.

We should keep in mind that the upper-class lefties hated Nixon even before he was elected, because of Alger Hiss. There was a strong desire to punish Nixon for that.

The campaign of Newt Gingrich to impeach President Clinton is the greatest strategic miscalculation in American political history. Only Andrew Johnson had been actually impeached before that. To think that he could get the votes required in the Senate to remove Clinton, looking back, seems ridiculously naive on Gingrich’s part. Clinton was popular with Democrats and voting to convict would have been political suicide for Dem Senators. There was never going to be a “for the good of the country” calculation on their parts.

And the result was that the Democrats felt completely justified in taking the gloves off. Impeachment was on the table from then on. The inchoate hatred generated by the Republicans’ half-baked attempt poisoned the “Contract with America,” cut unity after 9/11 short, led to the revived anti-war movement (because W provided them with a war to be against), got Obama elected, etc.

Now with Trump, they have their perfect bete noire. Gingrich’s well-documented arrogance is the cause. Of all the times to keep one’s powder dry, that was it.

— Mitchel Strand

Gingrich never wanted to impeach. The Republicans in Congress flipped and flopped and struggled to avoid impeaching. But tremendous pressure to do so came from the base voters, and Clinton kept rubbing salt in it.

The reason the GOP lost seats in the 1998 election was not that they tried to impeach Clinton, it was that they tried to back away from it. Congressman Hyde made statements a few days before the election that indicated that they had decided to let Clinton slide, and as a result formerly motivated base voters threw up their hands and stayed home.

It’s the same dynamic on both sides, the party bases detest each other and want their opposites crushed and their ideas marginalized. They’re not much interested in coexistence with people they regard as being evil.

After the election, the impeachment idea was dead until Bill Clinton himself revived it again with an insulting response to an inquiry from the Congress.

*Prop 8 was later declared “unconstitutional” by the state supreme court.

When Art is right he’s right.

I think there is a lot of merit to this. We should also remember that it would have been the older siblings, parents, or grandparents of the Boomers who elected JFK, LBJ, and the Congresses that passed the Great Society, 1964 Civil Rights Act, and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Boomers could not vote until (46+21=) 1967 or so. [The 26th Amendment reduced the voting age to 18 in 1971].

A lot of the “no heart at age 25 vs. no head at age 35” element to this as well.

[Quite a few additional good comments in this thread following Chuck’s as well.]

But even so, the Democrats in Congress would have had trouble voting to convict him without also convicting themselves.

Agreed. I didn’t support the Clinton impeachment back when it happened, although of course I was a Democrat then. I am consistent, however, and I have never supported it since.