What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around, but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.

I wear my composure like a suit of armor, for better or worse.

The commentator Peter Daou, who worked on my 2008 campaign, captured my feelings when he tweeted, “If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K, and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have shut down America.”

The election is now over, The result is now known. The will of the people Has clearly been shown. Let’s all get together; Let bitterness pass. I’ll hug your Elephant; And you kiss my Ass.

Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.

In several states, Republicans ran an ad mixing images of Ebola responders in hazmat suits with photos of President Obama playing golf. It’s ironic to remember that now, with Donald Trump spending about 20 percent of his new presidency at his own luxury golf clubs. I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter, and cable news, what’s left?

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Whether you’re trying to win an election or pass a piece of legislation that will help millions of people, build a friendship or save a marriage, you’re never guaranteed success. But you are bound to try. Again and again and again.

I’m not jealous of my male colleagues often, but I am when it comes to how they can just shower, shave, put on a suit, and be ready to go. The few times I’ve gone out in public without makeup, it’s made the news. So I sigh and keep getting back in that chair, and dream of a future in which women in the public eye don’t need to wear makeup if they don’t want to and no one cares either way.

One time, Liz brought something I hadn’t tried before: Flavor Blasted Goldfish. We passed around the bag and discussed whether it was better than the original. Some of my staff thought yes, which was incorrect.

But I think selfies come at a cost. Let’s talk instead! Do you have something to share? I want to hear it (provided it’s not deeply insulting—I have limits). I’d love to know your name and where you’re from and how things are going with you. That feels real to me. A selfie is so impersonal—although it does give your wrist a break from autographs, now obsolete.

I spent evenings studying in hotel rooms across America and at my kitchen table. By the end, I knew my opponents’ positions inside and out—in some cases, better than they did.

I was one of just 27 women out of 235 students in my class at Yale Law School. The first woman partner at the oldest law firm in Arkansas. The first woman to chair the national board of the Legal Services Corporation. The person who declared on the world stage that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The first First Lady to be elected to public office. The first woman Senator from New York. In fact, for a few weeks, I was both. By a quirk of the calendar, I was sworn in before Bill left office.

I’ve written about this before but it’s worth saying again: one of the reasons he lost the Governor’s race in 1980 was because I still went by my maiden name. Let that sink in for a moment and please imagine how it felt.

But I’ve never really been naïve again. Not much surprises me anymore. Throughout the 2016 campaign, my staff would come to me wide-eyed. “You’ll never believe what Trump said today. It was vile.” I always believed it. Not just because of who Trump is but because of who we can be at our worst. We’ve seen it too many times to be surprised.

In my experience, the balancing act women in politics have to master is challenging at every level, but it gets worse the higher you rise. If we’re too tough, we’re unlikable. If we’re too soft, we’re not cut out for the big leagues. If we work too hard, we’re neglecting our families. If we put family first, we’re not serious about the work. If we have a career but no children, there’s something wrong with us, and vice versa. If we want to compete for a higher office, we’re too ambitious. Can’t we just be happy with what we have? Can’t we leave the higher rungs on the ladder for men?

You’ve seen me in the papers and on your screens for more than twenty-five years. I’ll bet you know more about my private life than you do about some of your closest friends. You’ve read my emails, for heaven’s sake. What more do you need? What could I do to be “more real”? Dance on a table? Swear a blue streak? Break down sobbing? That’s not me. And if I had done any of those things, what would have happened? I’d have been ripped to pieces.

If we’re too composed, we’re cold or fake. But if we say what we think without caution, we get slammed for it. Can you blame us for feeling like we can’t win, no matter what we do?

I can’t count the number of times that good-hearted men who should know better dismiss the notion that sexism and outright misogyny are still potent forces in our national life. “But things have changed,” they say, as Donald Trump brags about groping women and a few weeks later wins the presidency, as his rally-goers chant “Trump that bitch,” as the White House proudly releases photos of old white men gleefully deciding which health services to take away from women.

Texas has defunded Planned Parenthood and refused to expand Medicaid, and maternal mortality doubled between 2010 and 2014. That’s the worst in the nation, and it’s higher than the rate in many developing countries. Six hundred women have died in Texas—not from abortions, but from trying to give birth. The number of Texas teenagers having abortions actually increased when support for family planning was cut. In one county, Gregg, it went up 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.

As I see it, this issue comes down to the question: Who decides? We can debate the morality of abortion forever—and I have spent many hours engaged in such debates and surely will spend many more—but at the end of the day, who decides whether a woman gets or stays pregnant? A Congressman who has never met her? A judge who has spoken with her for maybe a few minutes? Or should the woman be able to make this momentous decision about her life, her body, her future, for herself? Someone’s got to decide. I say let women decide.

Not domination. Not oppression. Equality. Or as the English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft put it 225 years ago, “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”

Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives. So many of us have been threatened or harmed. So many of us have helped friends recover from a traumatic incident. It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.

Men aren’t naturally more confident than women. We tell them to believe in themselves, and we tell women to doubt themselves. We tell them this in a million ways, starting when they’re young. We’ve got to do better. Every single one of us.

Friendships between women provide solace and understanding in a world that can be really hard on us. The pressure to be a perfect wife, mother, and daughter can be unbearable. What a relief it is to find people you can share it all with and be reassured that you’re doing just fine.

Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It’s also one of the hardest to define. In 1992 and 2008, change meant electing dynamic young leaders who promised hope and renewal. In 2016, it meant handing a lit match to a pyromaniac.

Reluctance to compromise can bring about defeat. The forces opposed to change have it easier. They can just say no, again and again, and blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. If you want to get something done, you have to find a way to get to yes.

Picking the midpoint between two sides, no matter how extreme one of them is, isn’t balanced—it’s false equivalence.

In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes.

But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party—the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

Another lesson from this election, and from the Trump phenomenon in particular, is that traditional Republican ideology is bankrupt.

Some economists estimate that automation could put a third of all American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four out of work by 2050.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, led the crowd through a mock indictment of me for various supposed crimes. The crowd shouted its verdict: “Guilty!” The irony, apparently lost on Christie but nobody else, was that the investigation into my emails was over, but the investigation into the closing of the George Washington Bridge as an act of political retribution was ongoing and would eventually cause two of Christie’s allies to be sentenced to prison.

Of the sixty-eight women who signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, only one lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment ratified. Her name was Charlotte Woodward, and she thanked God for the progress she had witnessed in her lifetime.

Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have a lot of ideas to help make life better in our modern economy.

I didn’t send a single email while I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I’ve never used a computer at home or at work. It was not until about 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone.

I’d like to call her. But right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just [gave] him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary [of] State—no independent dialing allowed.

Accusations repeated often enough have a way of sticking, or at least leaving behind a residue of slime you can never wipe off.

In previous generations, the Soviet military had planned to fight large-scale conflicts with massive conventional and nuclear forces. In the twenty-first century, Gerasimov said, the line between war and peace would blur, and Russia should prepare for under-the-radar conflicts waged through propaganda, cyberattacks, paramilitary operations, financial and energy manipulation, and covert subversion.

The third explanation was that Trump seems to have extensive financial ties to Russia. In 2008, Trump’s son Don Jr. told investors in Moscow, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. In 2013, Trump himself said in an interview with David Letterman that he did “a lot of business with the Russians.” A respected golf journalist named James Dodson reported that Trump’s other son, Eric, told him, “We don’t rely on American banks” to fund Trump golf projects, “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics.

Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that nearly 20 percent of all political tweets sent between September 16 and October 21, 2016, were generated by bots.

One study found that in Michigan alone, nearly half of all political news on Twitter in the final days before the election was false or misleading propaganda.

In the nineteenth century, nations fought two kinds of wars: on land and at sea. In the twentieth century, that expanded to the skies. In the twenty-first century, wars will increasingly be fought in cyberspace.

I’ve learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.

And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them.

In Wisconsin, where I lost by just 22,748 votes, a study from Priorities USA estimated that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes, primarily from low-income and minority areas.

The Reagan years had rebuilt America’s confidence but sapped its soul. Greed was good. Instead of a nation defined by “habits of the heart,” we had become a land of “sink or swim.”

The ’80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.