Earlier this week, Donna Brazile told us what we already know: Hillary Clinton and her gaggle of sycophants rigged the 2016 Democratic Party primary in Clinton’s favor. Brazile, in her forthcoming book, details how Clinton and her cronies took over the DNC via an agreement signed in August of 2015, not only giving Clinton a completely unfair advantage against possible primary challengers but negatively impacting down-ballot Democrat candidates across the nation. An excerpt from Brazile’s book in Politico details the manner in which Hillary Clinton staged what amounts to a total financial and strategic takeover of the DNC.

Brazile explains in her book that the agreement between Clinton and the DNC “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”

The agreement instantly placed any hypothetical primary opposition to Hillary Clinton at a disadvantage. The arrangement torpedoed the campaign of Clinton’s main primary challenger, Bernie Sanders. We can also speculate that the arrangement discouraged other potential Democratic primary candidates from entering the race, such as then Vice President Joe Biden.

But the damage done goes beyond the 2016 primary. Had Clinton’s manipulative and ethically questionable strategy paid off with a win against the Republican candidate in the general election, Sanders supporters would still have every right to be aggrieved. But Hillary Clinton lost. And not only did she lose, she lost to Donald Trump, a candidate intentionally elevated by the Clinton campaign and the DNC via a “pied piper strategy,” whereby the Clinton team, rightly thinking she had no chance of beating a mainstream Republican candidate, encouraged their cohorts in the neoliberal media to elevate Trump because, as was written in a leaked email sent by Clinton’s staff to the DNC and reprinted in Salon, a candidate like Trump would be “unpalatable to the general electorate.”

In her new book, Donna Brazile explains how Hillary Clinton rigged the 2016 primary in her favor. [Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]

This bizarrely manipulative calculation, as we all know, did not work out in Clinton’s favor, and we now have President Donald Trump. President Trump is Hillary Clinton’s fault. He is the Democratic Party’s fault. Vladimir Putin did not turn the DNC into a corrupt PR firm for Hillary Clinton. The Koch brothers did not do that. Hillary Clinton and her team did that. In her oblivious, self-important narcissism and through her ambition-above-all attitude, Clinton failed to realize that a country full of people ignorant enough to nominate her to the top of the Democratic Party ticket would also be ignorant enough to elect Donald Trump president. And now we are all paying the price.

To the people who still support Hillary Clinton despite all of this, all I can say is that you must have a secret fondness for Donald Trump and far-right Republican governance. Unless you begin to realize that Hillary Clinton and the corrupt neoliberalism she represents are cancer and the Democratic Party needs a complete overhaul, you will keep losing to Republicans and those Republicans, down the road, will make Donald Trump seem like a pleasant memory of the past.

The damage done by Clinton and her cronies to the Democratic Party cannot be overstated. In fact, it’s quite possible that the damage is irreversible. Until and unless the Democratic Party as a whole admits its fatal error in 2016, it will see its support wane. While virtually no one on the left and center-left is happy with Trump and the direction his Republican Party are heading, the “lesser-evilism” offered by the Democratic Party is not seen as lesser enough by a critical mass of people who also happen to be the most active and energetic members of any potential Democratic Party base in future elections.

It’s time to wake up, Clinton Democrats. Your glass castle has shattered.

Bernie would have won. [Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

[Featured Image by Jack Taylor/Getty Images]