At the beginning of the year, 2016 was trending on multiple social media platforms. Every couple of months, there’s a new wave of nostalgia online. I’m usually unmoved by these algorithmically manufactured moments, but thinking about my own hopefulness a decade ago has made me both depressed and angry.
My younger daughter was born that July, and her older sister was in preschool. A friend bought them “The Future Is Female” T-shirts, which were made by a small, woman-run business. These shirts expressed a level of earnestness that felt good at the time but in retrospect is cringeworthy.
Even then, I knew that Hillary Clinton was an imperfect candidate in many ways, and I was worried about the Bill-shaped baggage she would bring to the presidency. But I can’t deny that I was excited to bring my 3-year-old to vote with me that November; a woman leading the country would have been an undeniably powerful vision for a little girl. Those feelings of pride and aspiration rose again during the hot brat summer of 2024, and we all know how that went.
I was again reminded of my curdled optimism and the current level of accepted, casual misogyny in our political discourse when I went back and watched Hillary Clinton’s hourslong deposition in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation by the House Oversight Committee. (Yes, she was and remains a punching bag, even though her last political office ended Feb. 1, 2013.)
While I have no problem with the Oversight Committee interviewing anyone and everyone who might give them information about Epstein’s heinous crimes, the Republicans on the committee were maddeningly disrespectful to Clinton. The queries she faced from the majority were inane, referring to conspiracy theories and including disparaging innuendo. But interactions with two of the Republican women, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, stood out and circulated as viral moments.
Resplendent in a bright blue suit, Clinton responded to all of the questioning with barely concealed (and often unconcealed) frustration that at moments bubbled over into anger. Her expressive face displayed a full range of aggravation. It was incredibly satisfying to watch, because it felt as though she was channeling the exasperation and rage that many American women have felt at least for the past decade.
In the full video of the deposition, which was released by the committee on March 2, one of Clinton’s lawyers broke in to complain about Boebert having leaked a photo, against the rules all had agreed on, of Clinton to the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson. “If you guys are doing that, I am done,” Clinton snapped. “You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home.” Boebert, who acted tough about releasing the photo when she wasn’t facing Clinton, meekly responded in the room, stuttering, “I, I will take that down.”
Clinton’s deposition also included a heated exchange with Mace, who pressed Clinton about her husband’s relationship to Epstein and the Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and about Clinton’s relationship to the current secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick. In three rounds of questioning, Mace needled Clinton about events she was not present for. Mace asked how Clinton felt about allegations about her husband and sexual assaults and his trips with Epstein.
Clinton correctly pointed out that her feelings had absolutely no bearing on this investigation. Mace seemed to be taking a page from Donald Trump’s attempts to rattle Clinton during the 2016 presidential debates by having her husband’s accusers in the audience, and Mace succeeded in getting Clinton to lose her cool over the finer points of her relationship to Lutnick (which, again, are pretty far afield from Epstein, the ostensible reason she was being deposed).
I found myself strangely sympathetic to both Mace and Clinton in their tetchy back-and-forths. I feel for Clinton because she is once again having to answer for her husband and because she continues to be punished for transgressions for which she’s already paid a price. (Anthony Weiner’s laptop somehow made an appearance in this deposition. I was screaming “But her emaaaillls” into the void.)
But I also feel for Mace — who often acts like an unserious clown — because she is a sexual assault survivor and it seems to affect her to the core. She has gone to the mat for survivors, even battling her own party to attempt to force the release of misconduct and harassment reports against fellow members of Congress, and she deserves to be commended for that.
I don’t think most men involved with Epstein are going to be held accountable, and I fear that many survivors of his abuse will not see any real kind of justice. Yet Mace’s passion for justice for Epstein survivors is palpable, even if her questions to Clinton were hopelessly partisan. Most glaringly, Trump is still president. It’s unlikely he will ever be called to account for his long relationship with Epstein.
Watching this long deposition also reminded me that we are experiencing a vacuum of durable female political power at the national level. All the Republicans in the cabinet serve, as we just saw with the former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, at the pleasure of Trump, to the point that they seem to lack much agency. As my colleague Michelle Cottle pointed out this week, Noem isn’t the first ambitious woman to debase herself to appeal to Trump, and she won’t be the last.
There are bright spots among Democrats in the states and in Congress (Mikie Sherrill, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gretchen Whitmer come to mind), yet there still does not seem to be a clear path forward to higher office. It can seem that we’ve been spinning out in the muck of 2016 for such a long time.
And now Jasmine Crockett, a young-for-Congress social media powerhouse who was named by several people in a recent Opinion Democratic focus group as a Dem to watch, just lost her Senate primary in Texas to James Talarico. While voters seemed genuinely excited about her, some also worried that she was not as electable as a white guy. Her tough mode of engagement feels fresh to people, a Democrat from Georgia told our focus group leaders: “She tells it like it is. She’s not scared. She doesn’t back down.” And yet it’s still not enough.
Perhaps my nostalgia for 2016 is genuine and is not just a feeling fabricated by social media hashtags. It isn’t just a fuzzy fondness for when my daughters were sweet and small and my eyes were less baggy. The nostalgia is also for feeling confident that society might continue to move incrementally forward for women, with new modes of expressing power blossoming.
In the meantime, like Hillary Clinton, I will try to remain irrepressible in the face of the stupidest timeline imaginable.
End Notes
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I love all the TikToks that are imitating Clinton’s attitude during the hearing, and I hope they keep coming.
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In 2023, I wrote an essay about the toxic immaturity of the nominee for homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who threatened to fight a Teamster in the middle of a Senate hearing.
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This New York Times Magazine essay by Robert Draper is such a moving account of taking ibogaine, a psychedelic, to try to assuage his long-held trauma over his brother’s death. Draper’s story does not glamorize the experience or make it sound like a silver bullet for treatment-resistant mental health issues, but it gives an honest assessment of the experience and is helpful in understanding why people turn to alternative treatments.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post Hillary Clinton and the Collective Rage of American Women appeared first on New York Times.
