“One hallmark of authoritarian politics ... is ignoring the law as it applies to party interests while deploying it as a weapon against political opponents. For example, party politicians might ignore lawful subpoenas intended to expose their corruption while subsequently using subpoenas of their own to construct a phony case of wrongdoing by opponents.

”Such is the seedy exercise of ‘Obamagate.’ ... Few knew the names of the Americans who died in Benghazi. But Republicans exploited their deaths for years with a fully manufactured ‘scandal’ that, like the Obamagate fiction, does not withstand scrutiny. No matter. The extended Benghazi attack, the bull‘s-eye for which eventually settled on the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, served its nefarious purpose. Obamagate will similarly find its target: the 2020 nominee.

“Because neither the news media nor the nation’s larger political culture has reckoned with the GOP's authoritarian evolution, the habitual response is to mislabel GOP authoritarianism as hypocrisy. Calling out hypocrisy is a pointless shaming mechanism for a party that has broken free of shame. Worse, it camouflages a war on democracy as democratic politics as usual.”

— Francis Wilkinson, “American Politics Is Now Democrats Versus Authoritarians: When one party respects the rule of law but the other doesn‘t, political discourse can’t be normal,” on Bloomberg.com