Shattered - "The Aftermath"

Once she’d spoken to Trump and Obama, Hillary sat down at the long table in her suite’s narrow dining room to read the hastily written draft of her concession speech for the first time. Early in the evening, before the polls closed, chief speechwriter Dan Schwerin had chosen not to share a bare-bones version of the concession with her. He hadn’t wanted the possibility of defeat clouding her mind, and he was confident she wouldn’t be delivering it anyway.
But when losing became a likelihood that night, he and fellow speechwriter Megan Rooney had scrambled to meld parts of the victory speech she had planned to give with the concession. Over the course of a couple of hours, they hammered out remarks aimed at comforting Americans who feared a Trump presidency. They went heavy on themes of constitutional protections and mentioned Muslim Americans and women and others who might feel targeted by the new president. The thrust, one Hillary adviser said, was “We stand with them and we see them, and the fact that we lost this election doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting for them.”
As Hillary thumbed through the pages, the speech struck her as tone-deaf. It’s too charged, she thought, too political. Reines, one of the more than half-dozen advisers assembled around the table, reacted similarly to what he believed would be taken as an unseemly contrast with Trump. When Hillary was done reading, she looked up and told her advisers it was too much.
“Look, I really just want to concede gracefully, wish him the best, thank everybody, and get off the stage,” she said flatly. “This is not a moment for me to do more than that.”
Jake Sullivan, her chief strategist, took the lead in defending the tone. “Everything you said, we’re going to do in the speech,” he said. “But you have been saying for many months that he’s temperamentally unfit and that he would be dangerous, and if you meant it, you should say it. And you made a case that all these people’s rights and safety are in danger—if you meant that, you should say it.”
Reines countered. If Hillary did that, she would be portrayed in the media—and in the minds of many Americans—as a sore loser. Hillary had spoken so many times before about the sanctity of American democracy and the importance of a smooth transition of power. This was a time for statesmanship, not partisanship. He worried that it all sounded too much like a campaign stump speech. Hillary agreed.
I’m no longer a candidate or public official, she thought. I’m not going to be the leader of a party in the future. I want to exit with grace—and do it quickly.
“It’s not my job anymore to do this,” she said, her voice growing more forceful as Chelsea nodded in agreement. “Other people will criticize him. That’s their job. I have done it. I just lost, and that is that,” she continued. “That was my last race.”
With clear marching orders, she instructed her speechwriting team to go back to the drawing board and strike a balance shorter on stating values and longer on graciousness.
The regal suit Hillary had planned to wear in her moment of triumph, gray with wide purple lapels and a matching satin blouse, sat untouched in her bedroom. The hard-earned lines in her face weren’t masked by foundation. Her hair hadn’t been touched up and recoiffed for the cameras, long after they’d captured her going to vote in Chappaqua that morning. “It’s a humbling feeling,” she’d said at her polling location.
But that couldn’t compare to the crushing humiliation of the hours to follow. When she could focus on a task and block out the gravity of Trump’s election, her defeat, and the end of her dreams of a return to the White House, Hillary was stoic. Her voice was quiet but firm, her face expressionless, and her hands, which she normally used to accentuate her points, were still. When aides apprised her of new information, she responded briefly and without emotion. “OK,” she said over and over that night.
She asked Mook which decisions had been misguided, where they had erred in strategy and tactics.
“Our data was wrong,” he said, defending the allocation of money and bodies on the basis that they were the right moves given the available internal analytics and public polling.
“OK,” she replied.
Like the rest of the Democratic world, Hillary was in a state of shock. But, at a deeper level, she wasn’t completely surprised. Over the course of her life, no matter how good things got for her, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. When two-thirds of Americans had approved of her during her tenure as secretary of state, she’d known those numbers would plummet back to Earth once she became a candidate again. This campaign had offered too many examples of that dynamic to count.
She’d cleared the Democratic field of boldfaced names and then run into a primary rival in Bernie Sanders who coupled antipathy toward her among some Democrats with his own ability to bring new voters into the process. Each time she thought she’d defeated him, he rose back up to give her fits again. She’d won back the support of African American voters who had opposed her in the 2008 primary, only to discover that her attention to their concerns pushed away some of the working-class whites who had been her base. When the FBI director announced that he would not recommend charges against her over her private e-mail server, he’d also taken the unprecedented step of condemning her behavior and enumerating the elements of the case against her. She had broken ground as the first female standard-bearer of a major party but had to listen to shouts of protest while she accepted the nomination. She’d drawn the general-election opponent she wanted and then found him to be a much tougher foe than she’d imagined. She’d won three debates hands-down—a long-accepted indicator of success in presidential elections—and they had not been dispositive this time. On the very day that the US intelligence communities pointed a finger at Russia—the most hated country in American politics in her lifetime—and a recording emerged of Trump saying that he liked to grab women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks had begun parceling out a month’s worth of embarrassing and divisive internal campaign e-mails that had been housed in Podesta’s Gmail account. She’d run a successful campaign to paint Trump as unqualified for the presidency and then watched voters who thought he was too dangerous for the job back him anyway. And then, riding high in the polls and coasting toward victory in late October, she’d been rocked by a letter the FBI director sent to Congress implying that a laptop seized in connection with an investigation into her closest aide’s husband’s sexting might yield new evidence in the probe into her server. Palmieri had coined the dark mantra of the campaign—We’re not allowed to have nice things—but it perfectly described the way Hillary processed her loss as she sat in her suite at the Peninsula.
Her mind kept circling back to two factors: James Comey and Russia. For the first time that night, she lashed out. Her voice rose. Her eyes grew wider. Her hands began moving again. “These guys came in,” she huffed. “We were doing better until this happened.” Bill Clinton nodded in agreement and muttered something about Brexit.
As the night wore on, Reines, who had spent the early part of the evening in his room with friends, no longer wanted to be there. Capricia Marshall was furious. The mood couldn’t have been more grim.
And then the door opened to Clinton’s suite. A hotel server wheeled in a cart of sundaes, with sprinkles.
—

Hillary finally went to bed with the bustle of Manhattan’s morning rush hour beginning on the streets below. By 8 a.m., she had changed her mind about what she wanted to say to the public. Schwerin and Rooney had spent the wee hours on the floor of Reines’s room, paring back passages aimed at assuaging the fears of her supporters and putting a heavier emphasis on her acceptance of Trump’s victory. It was one of the toughest speeches they had ever written. At 5 a.m., Schwerin slipped the new version under Hillary’s door.
Now the speechwriting duo had returned to her suite, along with Sullivan, to go over the concession one last time. They sat down at the dining room table again along with other advisers, and Hillary told them she wanted to strike a new balance. She had come to the conclusion that her supporters needed to hear a message of inclusiveness in the face of Trump’s victory. Not as aggressive as last night, she thought, but it needs something more.
“We should go further than we have,” Hillary said. She had written notes in the margins of her copy of the speech, and she began to dictate from them.
“I want you to put in the Constitution as a device,” she said. She wanted to talk about the freedoms of speech and of the press and a third bullet that she described as being antidemagoguery.
“I think you’re talking about rule of law,” Cheryl Mills offered.
That’s it, Hillary said.
The speech wouldn’t be an enumeration of every subset of the country that Trump had offended or threatened during the course of the campaign. It would be more subtle than that. But, as one of her aides described it, the tone would be “graciously critical.”
Hillary wanted another significant change. In one of the margins, she had drawn a circle with a cross beneath it—the symbol for women. She said she wanted to say something about the glass ceiling—that it would someday be shattered. Rooney added “sooner than we think” and “to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful.” She and her aides made tweaks right up until the time, around midday, that she stepped to a podium at the New Yorker Hotel.
Wearing the Ralph Lauren jacket with the purple lapels she’d expected to put on the night before, and flanked by Bill in a matching tie, Hillary advised those who opposed Trump to approach his presidency without prejudice. “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead,” she said.
But she also spoke to their fears, affirming American principles she worried Trump might not safeguard. “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it,” she said. “It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them.”
Before she exited the stage, a twice-defeated candidate for the presidency who had represented her country as first lady, senator, and secretary of state, Hillary touched on the Methodist roots at the heart of her approach to private and public life.
“Let us not grow weary in doing good,” she said, paraphrasing Galatians 6:9, “for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”
—

On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia’s intelligence service), and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists).
“I’m angry,” Hillary told her friend. And exhausted. After two brutal campaigns against Sanders and Trump, Hillary now had to explain the failure to friends in a seemingly endless round of phone calls. That was taking a toll on her already weary and grief-stricken soul. But mostly, she was mad—mad that she’d lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency.
In other calls with advisers and political surrogates in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss. “She’s not being particularly self-reflective,” said one longtime ally who was on calls with her shortly after the election. Instead, Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. “She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,” this person said.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
In Brooklyn, her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio. They also decided to hammer the media for focusing so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, which had created a cloud over her candidacy. “The press botched the e-mail story for eighteen months,” said one person who was in the room. “Comey obviously screwed us, but the press created the story.”
Hillary wasn’t in the room that day. But, in private conversations with top aides in the immediate days following her loss, she struggled with the question of why Obama hadn’t done more to apprise the public that the Russians had gone way beyond what had been reported. She wondered why the president hadn’t leaned harder into making the case that Vladimir Putin was specifically targeting her and trying to throw the election to Trump. “The Russia stuff has really bothered her a lot,” one of the aides said. “She’s sort of learning what the administration knew and when they knew it, and she’s just sort of quizzical about the whole thing. She can’t quite sort out how this all played out the way that it did.” On the long list of people, agencies, and international forces Hillary blamed for her loss, Obama had a spot.
In December, a partially declassified US intelligence community report commissioned by Obama would find that Russia interfered with the election in a bid to help Trump. The agencies involved wrote that Putin “ordered” the effort to tip the race to Trump. “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012,” the analysts found, “and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”
—

In the postmortem, Hillary and her aides identified dozens of reasons she had lost: low African American turnout in some key areas; a boost in the white vote for Trump in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas; misogyny; the Comey letters; and the Russians, among them. Most of them could be divided into the interrelated categories of narratives and turnout.
Exit polls in Pennsylvania showed that Clinton and Obama won women by thirteen-point margins in 2016 and 2012, respectively. But in a state that has never elected a woman governor or US senator, men favored Trump by seventeen points—a massive increase over Mitt Romney’s three-point edge in 2012. From a geographical perspective, Hillary did better than Obama in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburban counties but lost working-class Democratic strongholds in Erie and Luzerne Counties that Obama had carried.
In Florida, Trump crushed Hillary in the suburban swing areas outside Tampa and St. Petersburg. As he did nationally, Trump did better with white Floridians than Romney had, doubling up Clinton at 64 percent to 32 percent. Romney had beaten Obama 61 percent to 37 percent among Florida whites.
Turnout in Milwaukee, the key vote center for Democrats in Wisconsin, was off by sixty thousand or so votes from 2012, and nearly three dozen counties in the state saw the partisan margin from that year flip by 20 percentage points or more in 2016. Trump won 52 percent to 41 percent in Brown County, home of Green Bay, site of the visit that Hillary and Obama canceled after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Obama had won the county by nine points in 2008 and lost it by two points in 2012. Hillary, who had been blown out by Bernie Sanders in the Wisconsin primary, never set foot in the state.
About a dozen counties in Michigan flipped from Obama to Trump, but one mattered most. Macomb County, flush with working- and middle-class whites, gave Trump more than his statewide margin of victory. Obama won the county by 16,103 votes in 2012; Trump took it by 48,348 votes, or about four times his statewide margin.
The closeness of the race brought into sharp relief the fundamental divide that ran deepest between Hillary’s advisers throughout the campaign. After a quarter of a century on the national stage, and as one of the most polarizing figures in American public life for much of that time, Hillary had alienated a significant portion of the electorate before she even launched her bid. It would be difficult to reset preconceived notions. “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable,” said one high-level campaign aide.
Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.
The number crunchers on the campaign paid careful attention to turning out her supporters and chose not to throw money at trying to change minds with traditional door-knocking efforts. Persuasion, they had concluded, just wasn’t feasible with face-to-face lobbying. “Imagine you’re on the ground and you’re sent to suburban white voters to persuade them to support Hillary Clinton,” one top aide said derisively. “Imagine what that experience would have been like and how many households you could really change.”
But another camp, which included Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.
“We started from the wrong premise with her coalition,” one leading adviser said.
Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from the hard-and-fast reliance on data and the development of her message to where she held rallies and whether she bothered to distribute campaign literature in swing states.
Hillary—who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style—sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics. At one point, plans had been laid to replace Mook as the person in charge of her general-election campaign. Hillary stuck with him. And after the election, she chose to blame factors other than the strategy she and her campaign manager had pursued.
From Hillary’s perspective, external forces created a perfect storm that wiped her out. In this telling, laid out in scores of interviews with Clinton campaign aides and advisers for this book, the media bought into an absurd and partisan Republican-led investigation into her e-mail server that combined with Bernie Sanders’s attack on her character and a conservative assault on the Clinton Foundation’s practices to sow a public perception that she was fundamentally dishonest. From there, Comey’s unprecedented public condemnation of her handling of the server, the Russian cyberattacks on the DNC and Podesta’s e-mail account, and new voter ID laws suppressed support for her. In a twist, Clintonworld sources said, Comey’s final exoneration of her enraged Trump backers and pushed them to the polls in droves. Along the way, they said, misogyny played a quiet role in turning men against her without an offsetting boost in support from women. Her most ardent defenders maintain that she nailed every major moment of the campaign. “Those debates were her. The Benghazi hearing. Her convention speech. Her getting off the mat in New Hampshire,” said one senior campaign aide. “She just does not give up.”
But another view, articulated by a much smaller number of her close friends and high-level advisers, holds that Hillary bears the blame for her defeat. This case rests on the theory that Hillary’s actions before the campaign—setting up the private server, putting her name on the Clinton Foundation, and giving speeches to Wall Street banks in a time of rising populism—hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover. She was unable to prove to many voters that she was running for the presidency because she had a vision for the country rather than visions of power. And she couldn’t cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions and yearned for a fresh approach to governance. All of it fed a narrative of dynastic privilege that was woefully out of touch with the sentiment of the American electorate.
“We lost because of Clinton Inc.,” one close friend and adviser lamented. “The reality is Clinton Inc. was great for her for years and she had all the institutional benefits. But it was an albatross around the campaign.”
—

One month after the election, Hillary returned to Capitol Hill, where she’d worked for eight years as a senator from New York, for retiring Democratic Senate minority leader Harry Reid’s send-off party. In addition to Hillary, Vice President Joe Biden and incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell gave tribute speeches. So did House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and New York senator Chuck Schumer. In her remarks, Hillary joked that “this is not exactly the speech at the Capitol I hoped to be giving after the election.”
There was something different about her demeanor and the way she carried herself, said one powerful lawmaker who was with Hillary that day. She’d lost something since the last time they’d seen each other. The stateliness, the confidence, and the air of power were gone. She’s the unpresident, the lawmaker thought.
Hillary’s joke about having hoped to give an inaugural address from the Capitol understated the way she’d treated that possibility during the campaign. It wasn’t just that she had hoped to look out over the National Mall and speak to a nation that had just elected her president; she had expected to do that. The defeat had left her at a loss. She didn’t have a plan B. Right after Election Day, she’d returned to Chappaqua and begun returning to the seminormal life of a former public official. She walked in the woods by herself, and with Bill, had lunch with a neighbor, and went grocery shopping for Thanksgiving. When supporters came across her in public, they’d started taking selfies with her and posting them online—sparking a “Hillary in the wild” meme that Adam Parkhomenko, the Ready for Hillary cofounder, turned into a Twitter handle. The smiling photos belied the pain she was suffering. “I’d like to think that photo of her the next day is what it’s like,” one veteran adviser said of her looking unburdened.
“Inside, there’s a person that’s crushed,” said a longtime friend. “There’s a person that’s got to rebuild her life.” She started that process with small steps—planning a garden outside her house and spending time with her grandchildren. Behind the scenes, she tried to find jobs for some of her aides. In one case, she sent names to Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was hiring for posts on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Worried about what her loss would mean for the big-ticket Obama policies, she instructed her aides to talk with White House officials about what could be done to protect the DREAMers, those undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and key elements of Obamacare.
As for her own future, Hillary told friends that she was trying to figure out how she could best fight for her values. She wanted to wait on that, she said, because she was concerned that she could unintentionally incite supporters who despised Trump. “We will rise,” she assured one confidante in a text message. It was a theme Hillary revisited a lot in the shadow of the election, as the thought of getting back off the mat helped her work through the jarring finality of the end of her presidential ambitions.
“She’s really allowing herself the vulnerability and the openness that come with a broken heart,” said one friend. “She’s allowing herself to be mad. She’s allowing herself to be grief-stricken.” But Hillary, who had yet to settle on her path forward, told friends she would bounce back and rededicate herself to fixing problems. Before she could do that, there would be one final humiliation: as a former first lady, and someone who had emphasized the significance of a peaceful transition of power, she would attend Trump’s inauguration. When the friend asked her about it in December, Hillary hadn’t yet made up her mind about that. But she believed it would be a bruising experience if she did go. “They’ll probably boo me,” she said.
—

In January 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, a friend casually mentioned to Hillary the recent reports that she might run for mayor of New York. “A lot of people are calling me,” she replied, declining to shut the door completely. Before that, and just days after the election, the New York Post had reported that Chelsea Clinton was being “groomed” to run for Congress in a district long held by family ally Nita Lowey.
The Clintons and their allies weren’t ready for the end of their era when it came. They had been planning on a triumphant return to the White House—not just during this last campaign but ever since they handed the keys over to George and Laura Bush in 2001. For their entire adult lives, Bill and Hillary Clinton had been plotting a political rise—first his, then hers. Suddenly, shockingly, they were without an office to seek or hold. The absurdities of the election—Russian cyberattacks, a rogue FBI director, and an orange-hued reality-TV star winning the Republican nomination—intensified the sense of grief for Hillary, Bill, and their inner circle. None of it seemed fair, and it had all happened so fast. No one in Clintonworld wanted to accept the end, but it had come. Hillary had acknowledged as much in her hotel suite on election night when she told her staff that the 2016 election was her “last race.”
An even more symbolic affirmation followed eight days later, when she spoke at a Children’s Defense Fund event honoring her. Her remarks that night, which included a powerful anecdote about her mother, were largely taken from the victory speech she’d never given on election night. At the CDF event, Hillary spoke of Dorothy Rodham, age eight, sitting on a train with her little sister on their way to live with family who didn’t want them. “I dream of going up to her and sitting next to her and taking her in my arms,” Hillary said, and telling her, “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up to be a United States Senator, represent our country as Secretary of State and win more than 62 million votes for president of the United States.”
The original line from the undelivered victory speech ended differently: “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become president of the United States.”