What Happened: How Clinton survived election loss
GILMORE Girls, yoga and a good deal of drinking. Hillary Clinton has revealed how she coped after her crushing loss to Donald Trump.
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HILLARY Clinton has revealed sad details about how she coped with her crushing loss to Donald Trump in the US election.
Early in her new book What Happened, which was released overnight in the US, Mrs Clinton writes about her heavy disappointment on November 9, 2016, the day after the election.
On a rainy day in New York City, she gave her belated concession speech and spent a long time in the crowd afterwards consoling her devastated supporters.
“I had to fight back a wave of sadness that threatened to swallow me whole,” she writes.
“At every step, I felt I had let everyone down. Because I had.”
After leaving the speech venue, Mrs Clinton was driven back to her home in Chappaqua, north of the city, where she “kept the rest of the world out” as she, and the rest of the US, came to terms with a Trump presidency.
She admits to feeling “tired and empty”.
“All I wanted to do was get inside, change into comfy clothes, and maybe not answer the phone ever again,” she writes.
“I’ll confess that I don’t remember much about the rest of that day. I put on yoga pants and fleece almost immediately. Our two sweet dogs followed me from room to room and, at one point, I took them outside and just breathed the cold, rainy air … Losing is hard for everyone, but losing a race you thought you would win is devastating.”
Soon, her sadness turned to anger.
“Over the next few weeks, I dropped any pretence of good cheer. I was so upset and worried for the country. I knew the proper and respectful thing to do was to keep quiet and take it all with grace, but inside I was fuming.”
She decided to stay quiet publicly, but behind closed doors she was unable to contain her rage.
“When I heard that Donald Trump settled a fraud suit against his Trump University for $25 million, I yelled at the television. When I read the news that he filled his team with Wall Street bankers after relentlessly accusing me of being their stooge, I nearly threw the remote control at the wall. And when I heard he installed Steve Bannon, a leading promoter of the ‘Alt-Right’, which many have described as including white nationalists, as his chief strategist in the White House, it felt like a new low in a long line of lows.” (Mr Bannon has since been pushed out of his position in the Trump administration.)
Mrs Clinton received a barrage of letters, emails and phone calls of support after her loss, offering words of encouragement plus a few tips on what she could do to heal her wounds.
Among the recommendations that she took up was to binge-watch TV — especially some guilty pleasures.
In the book she admits to diving into the Netflix revival of Gilmore Girls, the first season of acclaimed American football drama Friday Night Lights and the last season of British period piece Downton Abbey.
It is also remarkable to think about her snuggling up on the couch with her husband Bill Clinton to watch The Good Wife, a US drama based on a woman publicly shamed by her husband’s sex scandal while he was in public office.
She also fought back tears when watching Kate McKinnon impersonate her on Saturday Night Live singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at a grand piano.
She turned down friends’ recommendations to try Xanax or see a therapist, but she did find yoga and hiking in nature helpful.
“If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try,” she writes.
She adds later: “It wasn’t all yoga and breathing: I also drank my share of chardonnay.”
Her post-election mourning was also spent remodelling a house, organising her cupboards, catching Broadway shows and reading mystery novels.
She also found solace in prayer.
“I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realised and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.”
The spectre of Mr Trump looms large in the book, with the President being mentioned every few pages.
She slams him as an incompetent, unworthy, sexist “liar”.
“Donald Trump didn’t care about policy at all. He seemed proud of his ignorance and didn’t even pretend to come up with plans for how he’d build his wall, fix health care, bring back all the lost jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, and defeat ISIS [Islamic State],” she writes.
“It’s like he’d just wave a magic wand. He ridiculed me for taking the job seriously.”
In a previously released excerpt from the book, Mrs Clinton revealed she wanted to say “back up, you creep” to Mr Trump as he loomed behind her during the second presidential debate last year.
The White House, for its part, is unfazed by her criticisms.
“I think it’s sad that after Hillary Clinton ran one of the most negative campaigns in history and lost [that] the last chapter of her public life is going to be now defined by propping up book sales with false and reckless attacks,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
Regardless, the book is already a hit. It is a top seller on online retailer Amazon and Mrs Clinton attracted several hundred fans to her first book signing in New York City overnight.
Originally published as What Happened: How Clinton survived election loss