Hillary Clinton's new memoir, What Happened, is set to hit bookstores this month, but the good folks over at CNN have acquired a copy and published some of its juicier details. Hillary Clinton describes her concession phone call to Donald Trump in What Happened, and it was just as cringey as you imagined.
The road to the 2016 general election was fraught with spectacle, as Clinton navigated a minefield of email-focused scandals, and Trump's incendiary rhetoric escalated to a nearly unbelievable degree. By November, it had already become clear that Clinton was going high where Trump was stooping low, as she conducted herself with grace and poise in the face of buffoonery.
So it must have been all the more difficult for Clinton to call Trump to announce her concession late that night. According to What Happened, it was a surreal experience, and reading about the phone call doesn't make it seem any less awkward. Calling it "without a doubt one of the strangest moments of my life," Clinton writes:
I congratulated Trump and offered to do anything I could to make sure the transition was smooth ... It was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbor to say you can't make it to his barbecue. It was mercifully brief ... I was numb. It was all so shocking.
What Happened by Hillary Clinton, $17, Amazon
Something about that conversation, and the idea that it was totally normal, just makes it feel all the more abnormal, doesn't it?
Read all about Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and its aftermath in What Happened, out Sep. 12 from Simon & Schuster.
