Hillary Clinton

Bundle and safe with Expedia.

You were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row, we were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and subject to availability, flight inclusive packages are at all protected.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Jover.

On election night 2016, I was in the Javits Center in New York City.

It's this big glass convention center on the west side of Manhattan.

Hillary Clinton planned to give her acceptance speech there and shatter the glass ceiling under a literal glass ceiling.

Of course, she didn't end up giving her speech, but fast forward four years and the Javits Center was filled with beds turned into a makeshift emergency hospital at the peak of New York's outbreak.

It was a striking contrast and one that's left me thinking about Secretary Clinton and what she must be thinking watching this election play out.

What did she think watching President Trump fly to Walter Reed with COVID?

After all, Donald Trump and his conservative allies pummeled her after she contracted pneumonia in September 2016, and there was that video of her falling over.

So on this week's show, Hillary Clinton joins me, and I asked her.

It's a bit incredible to look back on the 2016 race with the rise of Donald Trump, Russian election interference, the Comey letter.

and consider that that was almost a normal election.

In the interview, you'll hear me mention rolling oranges with the secretary.

That's something we in the press did in those days before 2020.

You'd fly around in the same plane as the candidates, and when they weren't offering up the chance to ask a question, sometimes people would write on an orange and roll it down the aisle to get them in the front of the plane.

Sometimes they'd roll it back.

Today, being on a plane with a candidate, let alone bowling fruit to them, doesn't happen because...

It's too dangerous.

So I've been doing a lot of my reporting on Zoom and stuck in DC for the many months I expected to be out on the trail.

The silver lining, of course, is that sometimes I've gotten to talk to the folks I wouldn't have normally seen out on the trail because they're stuck at home too.

So without any more to do, here's Secretary Hillary Clinton on Zoom from her home in Chappaquan, New York.

Oh, hi.

Hi.

How are you?

Oh, you know, Groundhog Day.

I'm fine.

It's Groundhog Day for all of us.

You're not kidding.

Totally.

How has quarantine been in lockdown?

You know, thankfully, we're all healthy and we're well.

And,

you know, we've been outdoors a lot and, you know, that's been a saving grace.

The weather's been fabulous.

I don't know what's going to happen when it starts getting cold and dreary again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've reached the point where the other day I put a jacket on and I reached in and I found a face mask in the jackets of the seasonal weather.

Oh, wow.

Which is depressing.

I mean,

that's a marker.

What a deal.

Well, at least we're not, you know, participating in super spreading events.

Yeah.

I've been

somewhat complaining about Joe Biden not doing more press events on the one hand.

On the other, I'm not sick.

You know what?

I really admire the way that he not only followed the science and he did what.

a normal, mature, responsible person should do, but that he stuck with it.

Yeah.

You know, good for him and good for the, you know, campaign around him and his family and that wonderful shot yesterday of Jill pulling him back a little bit from the scrum.

Yeah, it was good.

Are you covering him?

Yeah, I mean, I've been with him no further than Wilmington or Philadelphia since it's all started.

But yeah, I was all around beforehand.

I was with him on March 9th at the final rally that he did, and they were squirting hand sanitizer to everybody who came in.

And I admittedly tweeted a video of it.

They were like, hand sanitizer, hand sanitizer.

I was like, look how crazy things are at this point.

And now like that hand sanitizer was probably worth a couple hundred dollars a gallon than a few days.

Yeah, 100%.

That's exactly right.

And I went out one day to Detroit with Harris two weeks ago.

And that's the only time I've been on a plane since then.

And it's been weird.

Did you fly with her or you flowed?

No, she doesn't have a press plane at all.

And Biden has a plane that trails.

So nobody's on the plane with them.

Yeah, well, again, that's totally understandable given that.

It's totally understandable.

And like, look, I understand why to be on the plane, but also it's not like we ever got anything out of being on the plane with you or anyone else, like, really.

You know, like, if you would come back, I mean, for those like photographers did, photographers got stuff.

Yeah, but like most of the time, it wasn't really worth it.

But

yeah.

You had to be there just in case.

Roll the oranges down.

Exactly.

I was looking because obviously today was a big day in the 2016 campaign.

I was with Kane when everything hit and we were in Vegas and there was an orange that we had rolled down the aisle that had like slots or blackjack or whatever on it.

And that was, yeah.

I have about 700 questions, so I feel like we should get started.

Can we start with this?

You had a moment in the 2016 campaign where you had pneumonia, you collapsed at that event.

It became a whole sprouting up of conspiracies.

Sean Hannity had doctors on Fox News diagnosing what was going on.

When you look at what has happened with President Trump and the way the reaction to it has been and how it's being covered, I just wonder how it looks to you having been through that with everybody focused on your health.

Well, I mean, it's apples and oranges completely.

You know, when I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia, I was immediately put on antibiotics.

I was told that I was not contagious and

I, you know, tried to go on with my schedule, which, you know, proved to be problematic because I got overheated at the 9-11 ceremony and knew that I was going to have to, you know, leave.

And so left and, you know, went to my daughter's apartment, rested for, you know, I don't know, an hour or so.

And then I felt much, much better because the antibiotics had kicked in and I felt better.

And I got up, walked out, and went on with the campaign.

You know, I don't even think it's comparable.

We have an infectious, contagious disease that

has already killed, what, more than 210,000 Americans.

And the contrast between what one would expect a leader to try to model between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is literally night and day.

And it's heartbreaking to me, Isaac.

I mean,

I don't wish ill on anybody.

I don't want anybody to get this virus because even though millions have, some people have lingering effects.

Obviously, a lot of people die and it looks like many more will if we don't get it under control.

I don't even know how to evaluate it because I can't imagine the depth of irresponsibility and disregard for other people that Trump exhibits in this and so many other ways.

So I don't really have anything to contribute to the ongoing

saga of why he behaves the way he does and why he treats people the way he does and why he won't listen to people who actually know something.

It's, you know, it's pretty distressing on all fronts.

One of the things that I think people who haven't been in the White House don't realize is how cramped the quarters are there, certainly in the workspace.

Well, also the living space.

I mean, you know, now that residents.

You've spent more time there than I have.

Yeah, I have a few years.

You know, resident staff are getting sick.

Secret Service are getting sick.

I mean, it's not just the professional, political, and civil servant staff.

It's everybody, because you're right.

I mean, it's a relatively small, closed environment.

I was thinking about this actually over the summer when I started, I walked by a bus stop that had Stronger Together written on it about the pandemic and how odd it must be that that slogan that I know was somewhat debated on your campaign whether to actually have it, but it was the slogan.

And it got made fun of.

And then all of a sudden, that's what we're all supposed to be thinking in the pandemic.

Yeah, I've noticed that, as you might guess.

You know, I loved that slogan because I thought that was exactly how we should think about the future.

I knew that there were divisions and challenges within the country that were going to have to be addressed.

And I believe then, I believe now that, you know, we needed to bring people together to tackle some of these big problems.

But look, you know, it was no competition for 24-7.

unbelievable entertainment coming from the other side.

And I understand that.

It was frustrating, obviously, but it was hard to compete with

the show going on.

But now I see it in all kinds of settings.

I see it, advertisers using it to sell products.

I see it as an appeal to bring people together and to support our frontline health care workers and our first responders and so much else.

And so it really now represents what I hoped it would back then.

When you think back to where things were four years ago and what these last four years have been, many people have been surprised that the institutions didn't hold up as much as they thought they might, the norms didn't hold up.

I remember about a year ago on the campaign trail asking a bunch of the Democrats who were running for president if they thought we were close to the brink of something.

I wonder when you think back on this,

did you realize how rickety so much of our system was, how much of the country is, that it took so little over so little time to get to this point?

Well, I certainly feared for the country under Trump's leadership, and his inauguration speech was a really dire warning about what to expect.

I didn't really anticipate how totally craven the Republican Party had become or was willing to be used by Trump.

I've served with some of the people who are still there in the Senate.

I always thought of them on the opposite side of the aisle, but people with minds of their own and a sense of

duty and responsibility.

You had a good relationship with Lindsey Graham, right?

Well, you know, I mean, Lindsay was, I mean, I knew a bunch of them and served with a bunch of them and sponsored legislation with a bunch of them, traveled with them.

I mean, you know, I had a personal and professional relationship.

And

I just could not believe my eyes and ears as I watched them be totally undermined and subordinated to Trump's whims.

You know, look what's happening now.

I mean, he tweets that he's done with negotiating over a stimulus package.

And first of all, I think that's a horrible abdication responsibility.

And for whatever combination of reasons, you know, his neuroses, his pathologies, his being on steroids, whatever it is, he dismissed it.

And he left the Republican candidates who are running for re-election in the Senate dangling out there, grasping for any straw they can hang on to.

And so now he's back saying, well, you know, let's see what's going to, you know, he is just an unpredictable and destructive character.

And so many of the Republicans have given in to that, which has shocked me, Isaac.

I mean, you know, we can talk about institutions, but we are a government, yes, of institutions and of norms, but also separation of powers and balance amongst our institutions, which he has demolished because so few Republicans have stood up to him.

We're going to take a short break.

When we're back, I ask Secretary Clinton whether 2016 or 2020 is the more important election.

Stay with us.

She has some choice words for Mark Zuckerberg.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, convenient installation options, and the best selection of BF Goodrich tires.

Go to tire rack.com to see their BF Goodrich test results, tire ratings, and reviews, and be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

When you think back on it, obviously 2016 was an important election for you.

But for America, does 2016 end up being the more important election or is 2020?

Is it about choosing to go down this path for the last four years or is it about choosing to continue on it or not?

I think they're both important and they're important in some similar but also

significant

different ways.

You know, 2016 was such an unprecedented election because of foreign interference, which was

quite effective, and also a lot of

use of the internet, social media to spread misinformation, disinformation, outright lies.

We hadn't seen that.

I mean, obviously politics is

a rough game,

but we hadn't seen those combination of factors at work.

And it really did,

I think,

scare a lot of people.

So there was a kind of retrenchment and

effort in the 2018 midterm by voters to

send a very clear message that, wait a minute, you know,

we got to balance this out.

We're not happy with the way things are going.

And now, of course, with the 2020 election,

we know from all the reporting that's been done and lots of

external comments from...

people who have seen classified information that, you know, the Russians are at it again, disinformation is at it again, voter suppression is obviously added again.

But now we have much more information on which to make an informed choice.

And I think that's why you see the polls really moving toward Biden dramatically, in part because people have been exposed to four years of Trump, but they've also been exposed in a very intense way over these last weeks to Trump on the debate stage, Trump getting COVID, Trump leaving Walter Reed to drive around.

I mean, things that before people were kind of either okay with or rolled their eyes at, but didn't really think of as being definitive in how they considered their government have really opened eyes.

And so I think people in this election understand more than they did in 2016 what the stakes for the democracy is.

And they're going to vote accordingly, I believe.

You've talked about Facebook, you were just talking about the disinformation.

And I don't mean to dwell on this about as it relates to you or what if, but even if you had won,

if Trump had not been president, it seems like disinformation and everything that has been going on would be a big part of our lives.

It's not some people often say it's about President Trump, and he certainly seems to contribute to it quite a bit.

But knowing that it's not really

about the president, whoever the president is, but it's about something deeper going on,

what do we do about this, do you think?

And how much of a responsibility do you think Mark Zuckerberg really himself has about what to do here?

Look, I think of Mark kind of like the sorcerer's apprentice.

You know, he thought he'd created a great way to connect people and make a lot of money.

And he understood that if he was going to keep growing his company, growing his reach, having the dominance that he sought, he was going to have to put up with, live with algorithms that rewarded disinformation, rewarded the kind of conspiracy, clickbait stuff that addicted people to Facebook and other social media platforms.

So you're right.

I mean, if I had won the Electoral College and been inaugurated,

I think we would have had to have a reckoning, which we're going to have to have hopefully in a Biden administration.

Because if you saw the movie on Netflix recently, Social Dilemma, if you've read a lot of really thoughtful commentary from people who started off as big believers, big investors, coders, engineers in helping to build those platforms, you see that they're all saying, wait a minute, you know, this is out of control.

It's something that is really antagonistic toward democracy.

You know, I tweeted maybe a week or two ago about how disinformation and democracy cannot coexist forever.

And I got flooded by comments from,

you know, Silicon Valley tech guys who I know who said, you know, I never believed this before, but you're right on.

I didn't understand this before.

And I think that's a dawning realization on a lot of people that

if we're going to protect our democracy, then we're going to have to come to grips with the role that social media is playing.

And, you know, after the 2016 election, I didn't really understand the impactfully that it had had on my race.

I knew it was there.

I knew the Russians had stolen stuff and then dumped it.

I knew that, you know, there was all kinds of shenanigans going on.

Having read now a lot of the academic, totally independent research that's been done, it was

very impactful.

I mean, a lot lot of people who voted for Trump believed I was dying

because it wasn't just that I had pneumonia and

sort of tripped on the curb getting into the car as I was leaving 9-11 ceremony.

It was that every night on Fox News and elsewhere, I was dying.

And more significantly, maybe.

There were a lot of fake, so-called fake news sites.

I mean, really fake news sites coming out of Macedonia and Ukraine and wherever that were being fed into people's Facebook accounts.

So, I I mean, I literally was, you know, on death's door.

Or most amazingly, there was an Ohio state study which found that a significant percentage of people were told on their Facebook feeds that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump, which they believed.

So, I mean, you can go on and on and you can see in real world political, but not just politics, it's, you know, the whole QAnon stuff.

It's the, you know, really gross attacks on people, accusing them of all kinds of stuff, which, you know, really often causes them to be physically afraid and threatened.

It has a direct impact on whether or not we're going to have a democracy where people have enough trust in the information that they get to be able to make the decisions that we should.

Yeah, and it's all over the world, you see it.

It does seem like Mark Zuckerberg has got more power over global politics than really any human being.

Well, some of the worst critiques or the critiques about the worst behavior coming out of Facebook have looked at what the military did in Myanmar with the Rohingya, for example, what Duarte does in the Philippines.

I mean, you can go down the list of really bad actors who kind of woke up and said, wow, I had no idea how effective this could be.

Who do I go after today?

And began to use Facebook and to

a lesser but still important extent other platforms as well.

And the excuses are just no longer adequate.

Like, oh my God, we didn't know that Russians were buying ads.

Or this is all free speech.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, they were paying in rubles, but we never connected it.

I mean, it's just kind of, okay, we've heard this before and we're not buying it anymore.

So I think that a Biden administration is going to have to figure out what to do to try to, you know, set some guardrails

for these platforms, just like like you have guardrails as a journalist.

I try to bust through them sometimes, but.

Yeah, I know, but you couldn't even

say, you know, wait a minute.

I just want to pause for a moment on the Russia question, because you had a much darker view of Vladimir Putin than a lot of other people did.

pre-4 years ago.

I think that includes a lot of people who were your former colleagues in the Obama administration, in some ways more than President Obama himself.

And perhaps that's one of the reasons why Vladimir Putin wanted to make sure that you weren't the president.

What are we supposed to make of now what his agenda is and what his goals are, given what we've seen over the last four years?

And again, no matter whether Donald Trump is elected in November or Joe Biden is elected, what do you think we should keep our heads thinking about there?

Well, I think we should understand that his goals are the same as they've always been.

You know, this is a man who said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of history.

He is an unreconstructed nationalist who believes that Russia should be considered a great country, even though it has a minor league economy and can't even care for a lot of the basic needs of many of its people outside of its major cities.

And he wants to prove that democracy doesn't work.

that the Atlantic Alliance doesn't work anymore and shouldn't be allowed to continue into into the future.

That he has allied himself with a lot of conservatives in our country who believe in strong leaders, who believe in his social agenda.

You know, one of the things I used to raise with him and his top advisors when I was Secretary of State was the way that he was using anti-gay rhetoric to ally himself with the Russian Orthodox Church and with very conservative elements within Russia.

And, you know, it was all, for him, it was a game.

I mean, power is a game to be played as hard as possible.

And, you know, like Lenin advised, you take the scalpel and you keep pushing until you hit bone.

So go as far as you possibly can go.

So I think I had a very realistic view of him and what his goals were because I'd been watching him for longer than a lot of other people who were just new to having to deal with him.

It's almost hard to overstate

how

much of a promoter of the Putin agenda, not just the strongman persona and autocracy and, you know, all that Trump yearns for, but his actual agenda to do away with the EU, to do away with NATO, to divide America.

And this is probably you know, the most

chilling part of what they accomplished in 2016 and what they've been trying trying to do less successfully because hopefully, you know, everybody has learned their lesson.

But I thought that the recent book by David Scheimer called Rigged was really a very important

look at the history here.

You know, we have been involved in trying to influence voters and leaders in other countries.

Obviously, the Russians have for 100 years.

But the Russians have used what are called active measures to influence public opinion, to use propaganda, to disrupt democracy, to suborn leaders consistently, relentlessly.

And they've been quite creative in adapting to the cyber world.

So a lot of what they used to whisper about, now they can yell about through trolls and bots and proxies of all kinds on social media.

So when I left the State Department, I wrote a long classified memo about dealing with Putin going forward.

But even I could not have imagined that I was considered such a threat to his ambitions that he would do everything he could to undermine me and to exploit divisions within our country in doing so.

Jimmy Carter, I was interviewing him in the spring of 2018 and he said to me then,

there's a general feeling on a global basis that democracy has reached its peak and is declining.

Do you think he was right?

I don't think what he said is a necessary

prediction about what comes next.

I do think that democracy is under pressure, even siege in a lot of places.

And unless we do some serious structural reforming, we may continue to lose legitimacy.

We have to make democracy work for everybody.

And, you know, you need that periodically.

You know, 100 plus years ago, we had to have the progressive era.

We had to really rein in the unchecked power of capitalism and do what we could to get a regulated market functioning.

During, you know, the Depression, you know, Roosevelt understood what he had to do to try to help people survive and also create some institutional safety nets for people.

I mean, you go through history, it's not a self-actuating, you know, method of governance.

You know, you don't wake up and say, okay, we're going to turn on democracy and it's going to be on for the rest of eternity.

You got to keep looking at it.

You got to keep tending to it.

You got to keep reforming it and fixing it.

And so I do think President Carter is right to sound that alarm that, yeah, around the world, we're seeing democracy under tremendous pressure.

And if we're serious about maintaining our democracy and making it something that people believe in again, are proud of again, work for again, participate in again, then we're going to have to make some serious changes.

And I'm hoping that a Biden administration will address a lot of those issues.

Aaron Powell, you have an article that ran in the October issue of The Atlantic about your speech in Beijing at the UN Conference on Women, in which you said that line that seems strange that it was controversial then and now that women's rights are human rights.

One of the points you make in it is that it's hard for people to think of leadership, to think of women in leadership.

We haven't had a lot of women in American leadership and around the world.

We've got Kamala Harris running to be vice president now.

It's one of the things that she's thinking about.

I know you spoke with her recently yourself for your podcast.

Welcome to the podcast world.

How do we make sense of that now, do you think?

And

how much of it also, when you think about the fact that you and Joe Biden, obviously there are differences in the election, differences in candidates, but you're both coming in with a lot of experience.

There are also a lot of similarities between you.

One big one that is a difference is he is a man and you are a woman.

How much does that end up in forming this, given that at least where the polls are now, he's in better shape than you were on election night?

Look, I just think that there still is a significant percentage of men and women who are not comfortable with the idea of a woman president.

It is something I saw, it is something I experienced,

but I'm very proud of the campaign that I ran.

I'm very proud to be the first woman in American history to win a caucus or a primary or, frankly, the popular vote.

So it's something that can be overcome,

but the margin is really narrow.

And you have to be very clear going into it as a woman candidate.

It is a burden you bear and

have to overcome.

I do think that

it will remain a problem at the presidential level.

Hopefully we're going to see our first woman vice president.

That will help to create more space in people's heads to think about presidential leadership inhabiting a woman.

I think it helped to have more than one woman on the stage in the Democratic primary this year.

So, you know, women come in all sizes and shapes and hairstyles and all that is helping to normalize women seeking the presidency.

I have just a couple more for you and then

think back to the election now a little bit more.

You,

one of the things that's become popular among your fans in the last couple of months, especially, is that certain things have been coming out about President Trump, and they'll tweet a clip of you from a debate or from the campaign trail in 2016 saying it.

The one that I saw go around most recently was about the president's taxes, which was something that you raised in the debate.

And the theme of those tweets of your fans is always, oh, she was right.

She tried to warn us, something like that.

I wonder what the feeling is for you for watching this come out

when

there were,

in fairness, a lot lot of things that you were saying in 16 that are more apparent now.

Yeah.

You know, Isaac, I really did feel sometimes like,

you know, the tree falling in the forest.

I believed he was a puppet of Putin.

I believed that there was relevant,

important information in his tax returns.

I believed he did not have the temperament to be president.

He was unfit.

Not a partisan comment, but an assessment of him.

And it was just really difficult to get the press to take any of that seriously.

You know, I can't even imagine what would have been done to me if I'd never revealed my income tax returns.

I would have been hounded.

mercilessly, but because he was a reality TV star and he had a false image of being a successful businessman, because I pointed that out too.

I ran commercials with small business people, workers who'd been stiffed by this supposed billionaire.

You know, they'd installed the marble in one of his casinos, or they'd built the ballroom at his golf club, and he wouldn't pay them, or he would be just brutal in forcing them to take a little bit of money.

You know, this was

a very clear pattern that was there to be seen.

But I, you know, can't turn the clock back and

really totally understand why none of it caught on.

But I felt like I had a duty and I kept, you know, I kept raising it.

I kept raising it and pointing out what I thought of as his

real dangers to our country.

But even I didn't know everything that was going on.

And so it was kind of a revelation even to me to learn.

Yeah, I was kind of picking up the signals.

I had information.

Like, you know, at any person who's lived as long as I had, that if you don't reveal your taxes, there's got to be something you're trying to hide, don't you think?

So in retrospect, it was even worse than I thought it was.

And, you know, there was just, I don't know, an appetite for the entertainment, desire for disruption.

You know, I looked like the safe choice after Obama.

And I knew that I was running against the historic winds.

You know, if you try to succeed a president of your own party after two terms, that's really hard to do.

Very few people have actually done it.

But I had such a high opinion of how Obama had handled the last eight years that I thought we could certainly ride through it.

And even with the discount about being a woman or, you know, not being new to the scene or, you know, whatever all the other challenges might be, you know, I thought we were going to make it.

And I think we would have made it, but for Comey's letter.

I think Comey's letter

basically

scared women in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Columbus and Detroit and Milwaukee.

And I think that's what, you know, really stopped me in the end.

The flip side is that over the last couple of years, every time that you have popped up, there's some reaction that says,

why won't you go away?

Enough, enough with Hillary.

And obviously that hasn't stopped you from speaking up.

No, it will not stop me.

Because, you know, look,

I think some of it is guilt on the part of people who are promoting that.

It's like, oh, you know, God, he really did turn out to be Putin's puppet.

You know, get her off the stage before anybody remembers that I ridiculed her about that.

I get all that.

I mean, that's human nature.

I understand that.

But it has no impact whatsoever on me because I really feel especially, you know, I'm looking forward to relaxing, you know, and not worrying every day when Biden's president.

I can go back to, you know, kind of having a normal life.

But for these last four years, that's why I wrote my book, What Happened.

It's why, you know, even in the face of a lot of pushback, I spoke out about Russia.

I spoke out about the real dangerous things he was doing, starting with alternative facts on Inauguration Day going forward, because I feel like I had maybe

more of an insight into this guy as president than most people could until enough time had passed that there was enough clear evidence about what he was doing and what kind of person he was, but that we couldn't let that go on too long because the stakes were so high.

And,

you know, I'm doing everything I can to elect Joe and Kamala and supporting a lot of other candidates and causes because we need a Democratic Senate.

We cannot tolerate another time of leadership by Mitch McConnell.

He has become just absolutely a tool of the worst instincts on the right.

And it just is, you know, shocking.

So we need a Democratic Senate.

We need a Biden administration that goes in with a lot of energy, good ideas, and gets as much done as quickly as possible.

Because you don't have...

forever to try to get things moving.

I have every reason to believe he will.

Why shouldn't the Republicans, if everything works out the way you hope it does, why shouldn't the Republicans, Trump supporters, respond to the Biden administration then, if there is one, in the same way that Democrats did, the resistance, not accepting essentially the legitimacy of his presidency, and not Democratic leaders, but voters, the demonstrations that were out on the streets.

It seems like that's maybe the cycle that we're stuck in here.

No, I don't think so.

You didn't see that after Bush was elected, even though it was contentious and decided by the Supreme Court, which is kind of hard to believe, but that's how it happened.

No, there was a widespread understanding that this election was not on the level.

We still don't know what really happened, Isaac.

I mean, there's just a lot that I think will be revealed, history will discover.

But you don't win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigan stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, whoa, something's not right here.

That was a deep sense of unease.

And

it wasn't really about me so much as about our country and about, I was the, you know, I was both the, you know, the protagonist and the antagonist, depending upon what position you were in.

But there was just this unease among a huge number.

you know, Americans about what had just transpired.

And I think it was also because from the get-go,

Trump didn't want to be the president of all Americans.

You know, he had every opportunity in his inaugural address to reach out to the entire country, and he chose not to.

So the unease, the worry, the fear even about what's going to happen, unfortunately was validated from day one.

All right, Secretary Clinton, I know you have other things on your schedule.

I really appreciate you making all this time for us.

And it's a great discussion.

Thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thank you.

Thanks, Isaac.

That's it for the ticket this week.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing the show.

Our theme music is by Brakemaster Cylinder.

And the executive producer for Atlantic Podcast is Catherine Wells.

If you have thoughts on the show or guests you want to hear from, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

And to support the show and all our journalism at the Atlantic, just go to theatlantic.com slash support us.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.