Shattered - "I'm Sorry"

“No! No! No!” Minyon Moore screamed into her phone.
“Yes,” the voice on the other end of the line repeated. “She’s getting ready to call Trump.”
It was 2:30 a.m. Moore had stepped away from the election analysts in Hillary’s midtown Manhattan boiler room for this call, and the other aide was inside the Peninsula Hotel, not far from a candidate who was about to concede the presidency to a reality-TV star.
“Well, why the hell are you telling me for if she’s getting ready to call?” Moore snapped back. “She shouldn’t do it.”
If there was anyone who spoke for the heart of Hillaryland, it was Moore. During the darkest days of the primaries, she’d been brought into the campaign—her fourth for the Clintons—because she knew the candidate so well and because she could apply a steady veteran hand to a machine being run by outsiders.
Now, a bunch of outsiders had determined it was time for Hillary, the first woman ever nominated for the presidency, to give up. She was losing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The AP had called the race. President Obama had urged her to end it. And the data-wielding millennials on her own team saw no remaining path to victory. But for Moore and a handful of other true Hillary loyalists, many of whom had lived through Al Gore’s too-quick concession in 2000, it wasn’t time to concede. Not yet. The numbers might flip by morning. “It’s too murky,” Moore insisted.
But Hillary was already midsurrender. “Give me the phone, I’m calling him,” she’d instructed her aides. It took a few minutes—giving Moore time to register her objections—but Huma Abedin finally connected with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. Huma handed the phone to Hillary, who put it to her cheek and uttered two words she’d never expected to hear in her own voice: “Congratulations, Donald.”
—

Hillary’s aides began arriving at a midtown Manhattan boiler room before sunup on Election Day. Addisu Demissie, a double-Yale grad who worked on Hillary’s “states” team, had barely had time to shower on his way to the office. At 3 a.m., he’d been at the airport in White Plains, thirty miles north of the city, to greet Hillary’s jet after her final rally of the campaign—a midnight affair in Raleigh, North Carolina, that featured Bon Jovi. Then he’d hightailed it back to the city. Demissie would spend the next twenty-two hours or so in the boiler room, kept company by fellow voter-turnout specialists and CNN playing on the lone TV screen in the office’s conference room.
A team of number crunchers settled into one of several side offices early. By the time consultants Joel Benenson, Jim Margolis, Mandy Grunwald, and John Anzalone trickled in, Hillary was on her way to cast her vote at an elementary school in Chappaqua. Election-law specialist Marc Elias set up shop in the midtown office, as did Minyon Moore, Charlie Baker, and Michael Whouley—the Dewey Square Group consultants who had helped Hillary plot her run from the start. DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile and Robby Mook floated in and out during the day. Mook couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen—a common fear for campaign managers on Election Day, but an unsettling one all the same. We’re not allowed to have nice things on this campaign, he thought. So what’s the nice thing that we’re not going to be able to have today?
When the first early exit polls came in and hinted that Trump was running a little stronger than expected in the Rust Belt, Mook believed the numbers were still in line with what Hillary would need to take key battleground states. As he made his way around Manhattan that Tuesday, though, his optimism was tempered by that nagging feeling that something—minor or cataclysmic—would go wrong.
Hillary’s communications team decamped to the Javits Center in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, where preparations for her victory party were being made. The venue, which would fill with Hillary aides, donors, friends, and well-wishers over the course of the day, was chosen in large part because of its distinctive feature: a glass ceiling. If everything went as planned, it would be the glass ceiling of the presidency that lay shattered under Hillary by the end of the night.
A handful of key aides remained in the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters for election night, but the top brass, including Mook, John Podesta, and Cheryl Mills, joined Hillary and Bill Clinton on their floor at the top of the Peninsula Hotel, a five-star facility a block from Trump Tower. The Clintons had their own suite, and the rest of the floor had been rented out for staff workspace and for aides, including Podesta and Abedin, to have private bedrooms.
—

At the start of the night, the Javits Center was electric: it had the buzz of a debut performance on Broadway. Outside, a seemingly endless line formed down Fortieth Street, near artists who had sketched Hillary’s portrait next to Obama’s and vendors who sold buttons with the candidate’s name. Supporters resplendent in their “I’m with Her” and “Madam President” T-shirts filed in and stood shoulder to shoulder as they watched the returns trickle in on the large television monitors overhead. Under the signature glass ceiling lit by an ocean-blue hue, they watched the network broadcasts and listened to a string of surrogates from pop star Katy Perry to Senator Chuck Schumer fire up the crowd.
Clinton’s campaign anthem, “Fight Song,” blared across the room, and an official block party formed outside for a spillover crowd who held American flags and prepared for victory. A block away, at the historic Hudson Mercantile building, Hillary fund-raising chief Dennis Cheng threw a lavish party for longtime Clinton loyalists. They watched TV and scrolled through their smartphones to check on election results. The plan was for these Clintonites to make their way from the airy event space to the Javits Center as Hillary’s victory drew closer.
Just before polls closed on the East Coast, Hillary summoned Jake Sullivan, Dan Schwerin, and Megan Rooney to her suite to go over her victory speech. She’d been sent drafts over the previous few days but hadn’t really focused on it until now. When the writers arrived, Bill and Hillary were already in the suite’s study. Hillary sat behind a desk, picking over a salad. She had donned a jewel-toned scarf and traded the gold jacket she’d had on earlier in the day for a more comfortable wool jacket. The writers pulled up chairs around the desk, while Hillary gave them instructions. She wanted to scrub the speech of anything that could be perceived as critical of Trump and his supporters. She added a mention of children with disabilities to a list of policy issues to which she would call attention. And she beefed up the “shout out” section to name-check more friends and supporters. Bill jumped in with a few names of his own. As the group tightened and rearranged her remarks, vote totals started trickling in. When Hillary was satisfied with the text, Bill walked into the living room and laid claim to the couch. He would remain parked there for the rest of the night, watching television and dialing friends across the country. The concession version of Hillary’s speech, a grim assignment that had fallen to Rooney several days earlier, remained tucked away, undiscussed.
Mook and Jennifer Palmieri had been in a staff room on the same floor, watching CNN, when polls closed in Virginia and Florida at 7 p.m. As the first returns came in, Mook dashed into the room next door, where Elan Kriegel and a couple of his data analysts compared the results with the campaign’s projections. Having guided Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign in 2013, with Kriegel at his side, Mook knew the nooks and crannies of Virginia precincts as well as anyone in the political universe. It’s OK, he thought. It isn’t great, but it’s OK. Then a cluster of African American–majority precincts around Jacksonville, Florida, came in. Those numbers looked strong, robust enough for a few fist pumps around the room.
“Florida started coming in fine,” one top Hillary aide said. “And then Florida started getting tight.”
—

Fuck you, John Anzalone thought. You’re being too pessimistic. From the boiler room, the veteran pollster and his fellow Clinton campaign consultant Jim Margolis were on the phone with Steve Schale, an old pal from their Obama days. It was 7:45 p.m., and Schale had called to say Hillary was in deep trouble in Florida. No one in the party had a better feel for the state than Schale, a Tallahassee-based operative who had worked on the Draft Biden campaign in 2015.
“It’s in real bad shape,” Schale warned his friends.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Anzalone asked. Hillary was on her way to turning out more Sunshine State voters than any previous candidate of either party. Yeah, Trump was winning exurban and rural areas, but surely Democratic hot spots like Miami-Dade and Broward would erase the deficit.
No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest. In particular, Schale could tell, heavily white areas were coming in hard for Trump.
At the same time, in the suite at the Peninsula, Bill got on the phone with Craig Smith, his guy in Florida.
“What’s going on?” Bill inquired.
“Numbers are tighter than they’re supposed to be,” Smith said.
“Where are we not hitting our numbers?” Bill asked. Smith gave him a readout similar to the one Schale was reporting to the consultants in the midtown boiler room. Pinellas, Polk, and Volusia Counties were the bellwethers he used. The campaign should have been overperforming Obama in those spots, and it was underperforming him.
All over the state, the returns looked the same. Schale and Smith knew there just weren’t enough votes left in Democratic territory to offset the Trump surge.
“You’re going to come up short,” Schale told Margolis and Anzalone.
—

At 8:03 p.m., on the campaign’s hourly election-night conference call, veteran Clinton consultant and summoner of gray clouds Mandy Grunwald told Mook she didn’t like the early returns in Virginia.
“These numbers are looking pretty soft,” she said from the midtown boiler room.
“They’re a little soft,” Mook agreed from his perch at the Peninsula. “But our model is holding.”
“It doesn’t look like the model is holding,” Grunwald shot back.
—

After talking with Anzalone and Margolis, Schale started getting text messages from Clinton number crunchers in New York who didn’t see what he did in Florida. He’d set off an alarm bell—unnecessarily, in the view of some of Hillary’s senior aides. They demanded to know what data he was using to determine that the race in Florida was over so early.
But inside one of the rooms on the Clinton floor at the Peninsula, a frightening realization slowly took hold of Mook and Kriegel as they watched results pour in from must-win states. Their vaunted model was way off in Florida. Worse, they had missed the mark in North Carolina too. Schale, they saw, was right. They could win without Florida or North Carolina, but the way Trump was running up the score in areas full of non-college-educated whites sent shivers down their spines. If the models were so wrong, they could be off in the same way in other parts of the country. They were looking at the early warning signs of a wave; all they could do was hope that it didn’t wash over the Rust Belt.
Not only were Florida and North Carolina, separately, the keystone states for two of Hillary’s three paths to victory, but the campaign had poured money, time, and surrogates into both of them. Hillary had closed her campaign just hours earlier with a midnight rally in Raleigh, and her first joint appearance with Obama, back in June, had been in Charlotte. She had unveiled her running mate, Tim Kaine, in Florida. She could afford to lose one or both of the states, but the chances of her winning the presidency would shrink dramatically.
Mook walked down the hall and into the Clinton suite, where he found Bill and Hillary in the living room. He stood over them—Hillary sitting in a big chair and Bill on the couch—and did his best not to sugarcoat what he was seeing in the numbers. “We need North Carolina, Florida, or Pennsylvania, and then we need other states,” he told them. “Florida and North Carolina don’t look great.”
He stopped short of telling them that Hillary would lose Florida, but he knew that he could be looking at the front edge of that terrifying wave. “We need to see if this is a Southeast problem,” he said.
While there was a chance that exurban voters in Florida and North Carolina were a bellwether for their counterparts in the Rust Belt, he explained, it was also possible that the effect would be limited to the region.
Hillary sat stone-faced, trying to process the unexpected and abrupt reversal of her fortunes. “OK,” she said over and over as she nodded. It was all she could muster.
Down in Florida, Craig Smith’s phone rang. The former White House political director, and the very first person hired onto Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, had been ignoring calls and texts. This one, he took. The raspy voice on the other end of the line asked him if Florida could be turned around.
“Sorry to be the one to tell you,” Smith said in an Arkansas drawl echoing the former president’s, “but we’re not going to win Florida.” Bill hung up and called Governor Terry McAuliffe, who was eager to depart Virginia for the victory party at the Javits Center. Don’t bother coming, Bill told him.
—

On the campaign’s regular conference call in the nine o’clock hour, Mook gave his assessment to the rest of the team. “We’re confident,” he said. “We underperformed our model in the Southeast, but it doesn’t yet appear as a trend borne out nationally.” Normally upbeat, Mook said this with a little extra gusto. He knew he had to sell it because the message was so different from what he would say if he were truly confident: We’re feeling really good about Florida!
His optimism did the trick for most of the officials on the call joining the Peninsula with Brooklyn and the midtown boiler room, but not everyone. Already, recriminations were beginning to fly. Benenson pointed his finger at the analytics team, which had failed to predict Trump’s turnout.
In a second conversation with Hillary and Bill, after more of the returns had come in, Mook pivoted. The moment of truth—the reporting of votes in key Rust Belt states—would soon be at hand.
“I don’t see how we win Florida and North Carolina,” Mook said. “So now it’s all eyes on Pennsylvania, and then probably Michigan and Wisconsin as well.”
Hillary was still surprisingly calm, unable or unwilling to delve into the details of how her dream was turning into a nightmare. Bill was less reticent. He’d had a sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States. He’d seen the transatlantic phenomenon of populist rage at rallies across the country, and warned friends privately of his misgivings about its effect on Hillary’s chances. Now his focus turned back to the international movement he’d seen gathering.
“It’s like Brexit,” he lamented. “I guess it’s real.”
—

Around 10 p.m., Mook jumped back on a conference call with top campaign officials and repeated, almost word for word, what he’d said the last time about being hopeful that the dynamics in Florida and North Carolina wouldn’t be evident in the Rust Belt states. The first time, he’d only talked about Michigan and Wisconsin. This time, he said “three” Rust Belt states. Pennsylvania, long thought to be fairly safe Democratic territory, was now in play. Hillary had run up the numbers, as expected, in Philadelphia and its suburbs, but the turnout for Trump across the spacious state looked a lot like what they had seen in Florida. On this call, Mook sounded less confident about his bullish message. I know Robby, one aide on the call thought, and that does not sound like he believes what he’s saying. He didn’t.
Mook could only help others suspend their disbelief for so long. “We definitely saw it, but we believed what Robby was saying on the first call,” one of his lieutenants said. “But when you start seeing real numbers coming in from the Pennsylvania T or upstate Michigan, you see actual data that confirms your fears.”
Over the course of a few hours on election night, the Democratic universe had gone from the boisterous expectation of shattering that “highest, hardest glass ceiling” to the silence of nervously awaiting an uncertain outcome to the solitude of an impending defeat. The evolution attacked the Democratic body politic in waves of stomach-turning recognition, emanating from the four electronically connected nerve centers in New York: the Peninsula, the Brooklyn headquarters, the midtown boiler room at Hillary’s personal office, and the Javits Center, where thousands of supporters had gathered.
—

At the Hudson Mercantile party, they kept waiting for a change for the better. Instead, positive returns were few and far between. At the Javits Center, campaign aides had gathered backstage in a space that looked like a loading dock, complete with exposed pipes and drapes doubling as walls to separate rooms. Some had arrived at the crack of dawn, eagerly awaiting poll closings with the cautious optimism of front-runners. Early jitters about Virginia settled after word came through that Mook and Kriegel thought it would be fine. But everyone could see that Florida and North Carolina were going sideways. Like the senior officials at the Peninsula, the midtown boiler room, and the Brooklyn headquarters—but on a little bit of a time delay—these aides were slowly realizing that Hillary’s chances of winning the presidency would boil down to her performance in the Rust Belt.
About 9:30 p.m., one of Hillary’s consultants sidled up next to spokesman Jesse Ferguson at a urinal. The early numbers in Michigan looked so bad, the consultant said, that Hillary was probably finished. On the convention hall floor, grown men and women groaned with each burst of additional bad news. Some cried. Others left early. The block party, once so boisterous, cleared out quickly, and a spillover room just off the stage never filled as aides had anticipated.
The torture was excruciating in large part because, while it was clear Trump was outperforming expectations, the races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were too close to call definitively. They were all much worse for Hillary than her private modeling and public polling had projected. It would take some time to figure out just how bad. The campaign had a contract to hold the Javits Center until 2:30 a.m. Eastern time, but the program was only long enough to last until 11 p.m.—the time at which Hillary had originally expected to know definitively that she’d won. As that program wound down and eleven o’clock approached, optimism was in short supply. In the midtown boiler room, Anzalone tapped out a message to a reporter who asked what was happening.
“Wish we knew,” he wrote. “Our analytics models were just really off. Time to go back to traditional polling. This happened in the primaries as well. They just put too much faith in analytics. We did not do any tracking by pollsters for the last month. Just maddening.”
In the conference room next door, Hillary’s “states” team—keeping track of the operations and results in each of the states—flipped the TV to the reviled Fox News Channel. The other networks simply weren’t calling races as aggressively. At 11:30 p.m., Fox’s Megyn Kelly reported that Trump had won Wisconsin and, in the same breath, explained the real significance of the state’s ten electoral votes: “There goes her blue wall.”
Until that moment, most Democrats—including most of Hillary’s team—believed that she would hold the states that Democrats had won in every election since 1992. Called the “blue wall,” these states accounted for all but twenty-eight of the electoral votes she would need to capture the presidency. None of the states she’d lost to that point—not Florida or North Carolina or Ohio—was part of the blue wall. Wisconsin wasn’t even the most vulnerable brick. Mathematically, she could still win, but it would take a miracle on a night when Hillary couldn’t catch a break. A nation of Democrats sat in stunned silence. They hadn’t been warned. Hillary hadn’t been warned. Even her pollsters had been in the dark, sidelined in favor of an analytics team that insisted she was poised to win.
High above Times Square, disbelief stifled the once-boisterous boiler room. It fell quiet. A new reality took hold: Short of a divine reprieve, Hillary was going to lose. Donald Trump would be president. “No one saw this coming,” Anzalone told the reporter.
—

At 11:11 p.m., White House political director David Simas was seated at a conference table in the West Wing looking at results with fellow Obama aides and perusing Twitter when the AP called North Carolina for Trump. At the time, Hillary was leading in Pennsylvania, but many of her strongholds had already reported vote counts. Twenty minutes later, Fox News called Wisconsin for Trump—a judgment that other news agencies declined to validate for hours. At the White House, the writing on the wall was clear. It was just a matter of time before Donald Trump would be declared successor to Obama.
When he was sure there was no path to victory, and after having conferred with the president, Simas placed a call to Mook, who was in Hillary’s suite at the Peninsula.
“What’s going on in your camp?” Obama’s aide asked.
“I don’t think we’re going to win,” Mook replied.
“I don’t think you are either,” Simas agreed. “POTUS doesn’t think it’s wise to drag this out.”
Mook now stood between a president interested in ensuring the smooth, democratic transfer of power after Trump had complained for months that the election might be rigged and a candidate who hadn’t yet given up on the idea that Rust Belt states might flip in her direction.
Mook stalled. “Look, we’re waiting for a few things,” he explained to Simas. “Pennsylvania needs to get called. That’s the linchpin.” Beyond that, Mook had made a deal with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway that a concession call would come within fifteen minutes of the Associated Press declaring a winner in the overall race. That hadn’t happened yet. And, he said, “I think we’re getting awfully late for her to go out and give what’s an important speech.” After all, Hillary was the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party, and she would want to recognize the achievement in a way that elevated rather than diminished it.
“Our plan,” Mook said, “is for her to go out tomorrow.”
Simas listened politely, but he didn’t like what he was hearing. He reiterated the bottom line. “We can’t drag this out,” he said. “The president doesn’t think it’s wise.”
Mook hung up and steeled himself. It was pretty clear the president had given him a writ, through Simas, to convince Hillary that it was over and that she should concede graciously and quickly. He walked over to Hillary.
The president wants you to concede, Mook told her, adding his own analysis: “I don’t see how you win this.”
“I understand,” she said. But she used her place in history as a shield in the same way Mook just had with Simas. “I’m not ready to go give this speech.” Though she focused her pushback on the nature of her remarks—How should she frame the election of Donald Trump? What would she say to little girls and elderly women who treated her as a champion? Could she hit the right notes?—the effect was the same. Hillary wasn’t quite ready to put an end to the dream she’d pursued for at least the past decade.
“You’re right,” Mook assured her. “ ‘I lost. Have a good night’ isn’t the way to go.” It would take more firepower than Mook had—more than a call from a White House aide to one of her aides—to move Hillary.
During their call, Simas had asked Mook for Podesta’s number so that the president could call his former aide and the chairman of Hillary’s campaign. Podesta had just left the Peninsula for the Javits Center. He went over because the campaign’s contract expired at 2:30 a.m., which was nearing, and there was still no decision from Hillary on what she wanted to do, other than avoid giving a public concession speech that night.
Within the campaign, there was a divide in the ranks. The young, up-and-comer aides thought the election was over and Hillary was just prolonging the inevitable. But some of the veteran Hillarylanders, both because they had seen strange things happen in elections and because this was their last hurrah, argued that the races in swing states were too close to give up on.
As aides shuffled between the suite and the staff room down the hall around 1 a.m., they began discussing whether someone should go over to the Javits Center and make a statement—and, if so, what it should say. As they were talking, the AP called Pennsylvania and its twenty electoral votes for Trump, removing one of Mook’s stated barriers for a Hillary concession. Abedin came into the staff room to say that it was time for someone to make the trip to Javits.
“Fuck it,” Podesta said. “I’ll do it.”
—

Forty-five minutes later, Podesta peered out from behind the podium at the Javits Center. Thousands of Hillary supporters had come to watch her make history, but Podesta was so jarringly in the bleak present. His brief remarks reflected the ambivalence of the campaign.
“Several states are too close to call,” he announced, “so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.” The glum looks on the faces of exhausted loyalists told a different story. Most of them knew it was over and just a matter of how long the misery would extend. Podesta was saying it would be several more hours, at least. “Let’s get those votes counted, and let’s bring this home,” he said to polite applause. That was it. No concession from Hillary. No concession from her campaign chairman. The White House had been worried that Hillary might leave it all up in the air, and that’s just what Podesta did for her. The night, it appeared, would end without a fully legitimized president-elect.
Podesta made his way from the podium to the backstage area where Hillary’s mid- and junior-level staffers had congregated for the previous twenty hours. Facing the bereaved aides, he searched for soothing words.
“Thank you,” he managed. “Hang in there.” It was hardly the kind of pep talk they’d have gotten from a senior official who expected to win.
“We all knew it was likely over,” said one of the aides. “It wasn’t like we were going to win this thing.”
—

Hillary cradled the phone. The smooth, confident voice on the other end of the line was as familiar to every American as it was to her.
“You need to concede,” President Obama told his former secretary of state. For the past eight years, their interests had aligned almost perfectly. She’d lent him credibility with her own supporters and in the Washington establishment. He’d given her the State Department springboard from which to relaunch her political career.
At one time, she’d thought about distancing herself from him to win the presidency, but their closeness helped her draw contrasts with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Obama and his wife, Michelle, had campaigned for Hillary like his legacy depended on her victory—and it did. But now, with Trump the clear winner of the election, the interests of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton diverged again. The shotgun marriage that had evolved into nearly as much of a friendship as an alliance was no longer Obama’s priority. He needed to ensure that the end of his presidency didn’t devolve into a postelection circus. He had vouched for the sanctity of the electoral process and he needed Hillary to follow along.
She wasn’t ready yet. But she was getting there. One by one, the obstacles were being removed. Pennsylvania was gone. The AP had just declared Trump the winner of the election. Now the president—the one who had convinced her to take the State job by framing it as a patriotic call to duty—was asking her to do the right thing for the good of her country. He wanted her to make it abundantly clear to the public that she wasn’t going to fight the result.
Hillary was torn.
While she was on the phone with the president, her team was still hashing out whether it was worth waiting until morning. “There was a lot of discussion about Michigan and Wisconsin and whether the numbers could flip it,” said one person involved in those conversations. Moore was among the more ardent advocates for holding off on a concession. But she was in the boiler room, removed from the central discussion. As Hillary and Obama talked, Moore’s friends at the Peninsula lit up her phone with requests for her to come and talk to Hillary. The pressure on Hillary—from the president and from aides who believed the race was over—had no effective counterbalance. Hillary was tipping toward a concession.
—

After Obama hung up with Hillary, he called Podesta, who was on his way back to the Peninsula to meet up with Hillary and the rest of the team there. Podesta had gone over to the Javits Center with the hope—but only the hope—that the campaign would find baskets of votes in late returns in the key Rust Belt states. But he also knew Hillary wasn’t ready to make any public statement.
Obama was determined to make sure his friend understood that the election was over.
It’s done, he said. Realize that. Deal with it with dignity and move on. After Trump had questioned the legitimacy of the election, the last thing Obama wanted was for Hillary to reinforce that message. As president, it was his job to safeguard the integrity of the political process.
Podesta explained Hillary’s position that she wasn’t ready to face the public and that the campaign was still hoping for a miracle. Obama reinforced what he’d said to Hillary. He didn’t see any point in prolonging the inevitable. It wasn’t a question of when she would give a concession speech but rather of making sure that she didn’t try to turn the election into a recount mess. Turning around and playing Trump’s game of questioning the institutions of American democracy wouldn’t be good for the country, he said. With his message now delivered to Hillary, Mook, and Podesta, the president hung up.
—

At the Peninsula, Hillary had made up her mind once she’d talked to Obama. She cut off the staff-level debate. It was time for her to talk to Trump. “Give me the phone,” she said. “I’m calling him.”
Mook had watched on TV as Trump arrived at the Hilton to greet his euphoric supporters. He was painfully aware of his agreement with Conway pegging the timing of a concession call. When he’d made the deal, he’d expected to be on the receiving end of the call. Now he scrambled to reach Conway. He couldn’t get her to pick up.
Eager for Hillary to concede, and to make sure he kept his own word, Mook asked Huma Abedin to try Conway and, failing that, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The delay bought a little bit of time for the camp that didn’t want Hillary to concede. Several of them continued to reach out to Moore. Maggie Williams, Hillary’s White House chief of staff and one of a small cluster of longtime loyalists at the Peninsula, said Hillary should wait. The margins were still so close that the AP hadn’t called Michigan. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were supertight too. Trump would end up winning all of them by less than one percentage point. “Had anybody known that night, no one would have conceded,” said one of the aides who favored the cautious approach. Once a concession call was made, though, it would be much more politically difficult to demand careful counting—or recounting—of each vote.
Hillary was done, though. Conway picked up Huma’s call and handed her phone to Trump. Hillary took Huma’s phone and faked a smile with her voice. “Congratulations, Donald,” she said, suppressing the anger that touched every nerve in her body. “I’ll be supportive of the country’s success, and that means your success as president.” Trump credited her for being a smart opponent who ran a tough campaign. The denouement lasted all of about a minute.
The news spread fast because Mook was on a conference call with other top officials. Hillary’s voice carried over his open line. “She’s literally in the background,” one campaign aide said. “You could hear her talking to Trump, conceding.”
Original Hillarylander Capricia Marshall, the former White House social secretary and chief protocol officer of the United States, couldn’t come to terms with the decision. She retreated to the living room, finding a spot on the couch that had been Bill Clinton’s home for most of the night. Now, as Trump made his way to the podium at the Hilton, Bill chomped on the back end of a cigar. Philippe Reines, a third refugee from the discussion around Hillary, came in to watch Trump’s victory speech. Bill looked over at the man who’d played Trump in debate-prep sessions. “I wish it was you up there,” he said wistfully.
—

In the fog of a shocking defeat, there was one moment that crystallized everything for Hillary. Not long after the concession call, Huma Abedin approached her once again, phone in hand.
“It’s the president,” Huma said.
Hillary winced. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. When she’d spoken with Obama just a little bit earlier, the outcome of the election wasn’t final yet. Now, though, with the president placing a consolation call, the reality and dimensions of her defeat hit her all at once. She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down. Obama’s legacy and her dreams of the presidency lay shattered at Donald Trump’s feet. This was on her. Reluctantly, she rose from her seat and took the phone from Huma’s hand.
“Mr. President,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”