What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

After the 2016 election, Stan went back to Macomb County to talk to “Trump Democrats.” He found pretty much all the sentiments you would expect—frustration with elites and a rigged political system, and a desire for fundamental change, but also anger at immigrants who compete with them for jobs and don’t speak English, fear of Muslims, and resentment of minorities who are seen as collecting more than their fair share of government benefits. Some of the comments sounded like they were ripped straight from the 1984 focus groups.

Putnam used declining membership in bowling leagues as an evocative example of the breakdown in America’s social capital and civil society—the same problems I’d been worrying about.

But suffice it to say that as of July 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been on the case for fourteen months and had produced more than one hundred criminal counts filed against twenty individuals and three companies, as well as five guilty pleas. I cannot resist pointing out that, by comparison, the investigation into the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack lasted four years and didn’t lead to a single indictment.