Hillary Clinton was right to warn us

For just over two years, I was a daily book critic for The New York Times, and one of my final reviews was of Hillary Clinton's "What Happened," published in September 2017.

I liked it far more than I thought I would — actually, I just plain liked it — but that's not what I want to discuss as these four grim years come to a close, with Hillary's more dignified, more intelligent, more presidential presence rattling spectrally about. What I want to discuss is the chapter about Donald Trump and Russia.

I still remember my reaction to it. (Whoa, this chapter is LONG, I scribbled in the margins.) Hillary herself seemed aware that she'd become a bit obsessed. "At times," she wrote, "I felt like CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show 'Homeland,' desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process."

Something drove me back to that chapter recently — maybe because we have to vote this horrid man out, when history will surely show that the Senate should have removed him when it had the chance. Rereading it now, what leaps out isn't how long that chapter was. It's how right it was. If anything, Hillary's compendium of Trump's ties to Russia was svelte. What we know about them today is that chapter, cubed.

This is the thing, if you go back and review Hillary's speeches and tweets and debate performances from 2016: She was right about an awful lot. Not about everything. She had her share of lulus, like predicting that the election of Trump would set off a global financial panic and plunge the economy into a recession. (Oops. Took a pandemic to do that.)

But she did have some strikingly good insights. You see it in the "she warned us" memes on Twitter: Here's the snippet of her listing possible reasons Trump hadn't released his tax returns (he's a tax evader, he's in hock to mysterious creditors, he's not the bazilionaire we think), all of which turned out to be true; there's the snippet of Hillary telling Trump that he was a puppet, which is worth reading in fuller context:

TRUMP: … from everything I see, (Putin) has no respect for this person.

CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.

CLINTON: And it's pretty clear …

TRUMP: You're the puppet!

CLINTON: It's pretty clear you won't admit …

TRUMP: No, you're the puppet.

CLINTON: … that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favourite in this race. So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

Two weeks ago, Hillary slyly said her own polite version of I-told-you-so.

"In my case, there's a whole speech for everything," she tweeted above a screenshot of this especially pungent quote from 2016: "Now, just imagine if you can. Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the next time America faces a crisis. Imagine him being in charge when your jobs and savings are at stake. Is this who you want to lead us in an emergency? Someone thin skinned and quick to anger who'd likely be on Twitter attacking reporters or bringing the whole regulatory system down on his critics when he should be focused on fixing what's wrong? Would he even know what to do?"

Yet it never mattered. She couldn't get enough voters to listen.

Why was this?

Tiresome to say, but part of it can be chalked up to gender. Novelists and Hollywood writers may create delightful female know-it-alls, from Elizabeth Bennet to Hermione Granger to Olivia Pope. But they seldom get happy endings in real life. In real life, such women are often despised precisely because they are right.

And if you reread Hillary's speeches, you can see that her words were really unsparing and precise. She wasn't shyly hiding her erudition. To wit: "Donald Trump doesn't know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program. Ask him. It'll become very clear, very quickly." Or: "There is a difference between getting tough on trade and recklessly starting trade wars." In "What Happened." she compares Putin to a subway manspreader.

Talk about a guy who had a problem with powerful ladies. After Hillary criticised one his policies, Putin told the press, "It's better not to argue with women."

But some of the reasons Hillary's warnings may have gone unheeded were more idiosyncratic. Early in her career, she tested good people's patience not with her rightness, but with her self-righteousness. Former Sen. Bill Bradley comes to mind: Decades ago, she batted away his request for a more realistic health care reform bill, adding that the Clinton administration would "demonise" anyone who stood in its way. "That was it for me," Bradley told Carl Bernstein, "in terms of Hillary Clinton."

Hillary has often been accused of having a Nixonian streak. According to a book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Hillary's staff put together a so-called "hit list" in the waning days of her 2008 campaign, documenting those who had betrayed her and those who had not, using a loyalty scale of 1 to 7. (Among the most perfidious: Sens. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Claire McCaskill.) When asked about her husband's marital indiscretions, she famously dismissed the Lewinsky allegations as part of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy."

It made Hillary a uniquely bad messenger when it came to explaining to voters that something dangerous was afoot when it came to Russia.

The thing is … what's the joke in Joseph Heller's Catch 22? "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." Turns out there actually was a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Was it politically tin-eared and self-serving of Hillary to invoke it when asked about Monica? Yes. But was it wrong? No. It was right. It was exactly right.

Prescient, if anything. Hillary saw the incipient makings of a conservative media ecosystem that was turning ever darker and more demented and underworldly by the year, until it became a straight-up orgy of phantasmagoria, news by way of Hieronymus Bosch.

I mean, Hillary is an actual demon from actual hell? Democratic officials run a satanic child pornography ring out of a pizza parlour? Exactly which corner of the triptych is that on?

During the Clinton administration, Hillary had merely to deal with talk radio and Fox News and the occasional hit piece from The American Spectator.

Now those outlets are at the centre of the conspirakook bell curve. One America News Network has since come along; as has Breitbart News Network; as has Infowars, which is happy to peddle every varietal of outrageous hoax and disseminate propaganda from Russian news outlets and content farms (as I type, two of the top stories on Infowars are from Sputnik and RT). Not to mention countless Russian content farms and a cottage industry of one-man Trump bands online.

It's notable right now that Biden isn't talking that much about Russian disinformation. Perhaps it's because he doesn't have to. Trump's fingers-in-the-ears approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic is fodder enough. So is the threat Trump poses to our lives in ways great and small, from American democracy to common decency.

But the Russians are at it again. They have targeted dozens of state and local government computer networks in the last few weeks.

Hillary did warn us. "Step back and think about it," she wrote in "What Happened." "The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American."

Being Hillary, she had a firm policy response to that. Toward the end of her Russia chapter, she proposed a new doctrine, "that a cyberattack on our vital national infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportionate response."

If Biden is elected — and God willing, he shall be (spit, knock wood, toss salt) — maybe he'll take her advice. In this way, but also perhaps others.

In late August, Hillary warned that Biden shouldn't concede the election if it's too close to call. She got hell from conservatives for saying it. As recently as late September, prominent Democrats were publicly disagreeing with her too.

But Donald Trump has since made no disguise of the fact that he's willing to win this election at almost any cost. He went so far as to say he needed to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a justice who'd break what he assumed would be a 4-4 vote, knowing the election could be decided there. Biden certainly has a reserve corps of lawyers working on his behalf, knowing that Trump has amassed the same. Both sides are bracing themselves for any and all outcomes.

So I guess it's possible that Hillary was wrong to say what she did in August. But maybe — just maybe — she was once again able to see what we did not.

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