Hillary Clinton is done trying to be liked | Moira Donegan
These days, her statements are unvarnished and resentful. To the voters who hate her, she seems comfortable letting them know that she hates them, too
In the months after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton went into the woods. They became almost comic, the sightings of her that would pop up on social media, as the woman who had exercised uncommon influence over American political life, who had in fact won the popular vote and nearly became president, reduced to a soul-searching wanderer in the wilderness, wearing fleece and wondering what went wrong. People asked her for selfies in public locales whose mundanity stood in contrast to her former power. Here she was, the woman who had watched Osama bin Laden die in real time, who had led one of the first major fights for healthcare reform, who had sat with presidents and prime ministers and extracted from them commitments to do things that they did not want to do. Here she was, once one of the world’s most powerful people, walking on a low-altitude beginners’ hiking trail. Here she was, the former senator and secretary of state and very nearly the first female president, in a supermarket outside her tony suburb, posing with a fan in front of a stack of organic apples.
There was a degree of schadenfreude in the sharing of these pictures of Hillary Clinton during the months following the 2016 presidential election. Even those most alert to the coming dangers and needless suffering that would be imposed by a Donald Trump presidency seemed a bit giddy at how far she had fallen, relieved to see her knocked from her perch of power. Much of the hate, of course, came from Republicans, people who resented the moments of her political career, fleeting and sporadic as they were, that seemed aimed at reducing the suffering of working people, or inching the nation towards justice. The rest of the hate came from liberals and leftists, people who had voted for Clinton in 2016 begrudgingly or with reserve, who considered their support of her against Trump as a kind of harm reduction.