Hillary Clinton Shares Her True Feelings About Donald Trump, and Warns of Dangers to Come

Hillary Clinton wastes no words getting to the heart of the matter in her new memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained: “Donald Trump” appears on page three. The book, dropped into a tumultuous election cycle and seemingly written up to the minute of publication, is the confessional that half of America has been waiting to hear—and that the other half needs to hear. In it, Clinton writes of the emotional highs and lows she’s ridden since her brutal loss to Donald Trump—a defeat that her supporters and others surely see as a consequential turning point in American history, but a loss that is an unimaginable weight on the shoulders of one woman, who declares firmly she knows she’ll never be the president, and will never run again.

Clinton doesn’t shrink from confessing what must be, and what she reveals is, a constant reckoning with the pain of that. She doesn’t shy away from naming names—she hits James Comey quite immediately in the narrative too, in case you’ve been wondering how she feels about the figure who catalyzed the results of 2016, and whose own attempts at memoir confessional fall far short of what Clinton accomplishes here. An unnamed retired senior FBI agent recently approached Clinton at an event, she writes, and “apologized for the way the bureau mishandled the investigation into my emails. He wanted me to know how sorry he was that he hadn’t stopped Jim Comey, the FBI director who trashed me in public and foolishly announced that he was reopening the investigation just days before the election.” Clinton writes that she was floored by the encounter, barely able to contain her anger, but simply stated, before walking away, “I would have been a great president.”

Later, she writes through the controversial Afghanistan withdrawal, describing how she deployed her substantial political clout to help evacuate women, as the situation and challenges fluctuated hourly and daily, such as the price to charter a plane, which could run between $150,000 and more than $700,000, depending on the moment during the crisis. She gets into the complications of the withdrawal that have drawn harsh and protracted criticism of the presidency of Joe Biden and the candidacy of Kamala Harris from other quarters. As former secretary of state, she would have a good idea of where to lay blame, and she sets it at the feet of four past administrations, including Barack Obama’s, for which she was that secretary of state. She writes that she urged the Obama administration to “prioritize the needs and concerns of Afghan women.”

“It wasn’t always an easy sell,” she continues, calling out the anonymous Obama official who told The Washington Post that “Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities.”

Elsewhere, she shares frank feelings on Clinton Cash and its author, Peter Schweizer (not good); her admiration for Liz Cheney, despite a complicated past; and how she and Michelle Obama slowly, delicately forged an ultimately warm and close relationship after the tensions of 2008, when Clinton lost the party nomination to Barack.

This book is not revisionism—it is crucial new context for our shared experience as a nation. The personal and political are woven together throughout the book, with Clinton matching intimate details and feelings to events we are well familiar with.

The second chapter, “Insurrection,” lays out her motivations to try to warn, once again, to avert a crisis as we barrel toward November 2024. Through Clinton’s eyes, January 6 had been a peaceful day in Chappaqua with her family—she writes movingly and often in the book about her love for Bill Clinton and daughter, Chelsea, and for her grandchildren, who moved in with the Clintons during the pandemic. (Toward the end of the book, she writes, “It’s no secret that Bill and I have had dark days in our marriage in the past. But the past softens with time, and what’s left is the truth: I’m married to my best friend.”) Like so many of us, they all watched on TV in horror and shock as violence engulfed the Capitol. Like so many of us, Clinton immediately seized on the insurrectionists’ fascist symbols, shorthand for their dark motivations:

Of the many awful images from the Capitol that day, one that caught my eye and sent a chill through my heart was the picture of a Trumpist defiantly carrying a Confederate flag through the halls of Congress.… The prominent presence of that racist flag was a reminder that this violent spasm was not an isolated incident and that Trump is not an aberration but an apotheosis.… It reflected the Republican Party’s strategy, starting in the 1960s, of embracing white supremacy in order to wield power. It captured the GOP’s increasing radicalization over recent decades, including rejecting core democratic principles such as accepting electoral defeat and condemning violence and extremist groups. Trump didn’t invent any of that, but he took it to the next level.

The next level is where we all exist now, Clinton included. There’s no do-over for her, nor for America. But there is time to correct our course, if we are willing to reckon with our truth.