The Guardian

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
‘For better and frequently for worse, Hilary Clinton has shed the pretense of trying to be liked.’ Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

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

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