How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate — whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama’s — come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician?

That’s the question Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Susan Bordo, Ph.D., asked and answered in her new book, “The Destruction of Hillary Clinton” (Melville House Publishing, April 2017). Bordo, a media critic, cultural historian and feminist scholar, presents myriad reasons for Clinton’s shocking defeat. The biggest culprits included sexism, the right’s attacks on her, Russian interference in the election, and “media madness.”

Bordo told the Forward in an exclusive interview, “We’re inundated every day with sound bites — fragments of supposed breaking news. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook, or watching CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, saw this endless repetition of clickbait headlines. Phrases became stamped into brains: ‘Momentum for Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton likely to be charged with email crime.’”

The author also referred to “two immensely powerful assaults” on Clinton’s candidacy. One was FBI Director James Comey’s “inappropriate, inaccurate, and inflammatory interference in the general election.” Bordo was, of course, referring to Comey’s letter, made public 11 days before the election, stating that the FBI was opening a new investigation into recently discovered emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. By the time Comey issued his second letter to Congress, on November 6 stating that those emails did not change the FBI’s July decision that neither Clinton nor her team had committed any prosecutable offenses, it was too late.

The other huge offense, according to Bordo, happened much earlier, during the primaries. In February, we all saw Senator Bernie Sanders throw shade on Clinton, shouting to his growing millennial fan base that Clinton wasn’t a “true progressive.” He branded her “The Establishment.”

Bordo told me: At first, I’d identified with Sanders. He and I have virtually the same background. He grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Both working class Jewish families, left-leaning, secular. He sounded like one of my relatives—kind of fun, a bit exotic. I think for many young people across the country, he was like a character from a situation comedy.

His appeal to the younger generation of voters seemed to be a combination of his grandpa persona and his socialist-sounding ideals. Bordo writes that Sanders became a bigger problem in May when he referred to Clinton as “the lesser of two evils.”

“People who think if Bernie had gotten the nomination he would have been able to defeat Trump, just don’t get it,” Bordo said. “Anti-Semitism, with the power of the GOP to use that in ways to alienate people from Sanders, was just lying in wait. You even saw it creep up for Clinton although she isn’t Jewish.”

That reminded me of the sickening Trump tweet with an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by money, with its white lettering against a red Jewish star that read, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.” Millions of Clinton supporters, like myself, have been left mourning what could have been while having to listen to the deafening blame heaped onto Hillary: that she ran a weak campaign.

Bordo said, “All campaigns make mistakes. It’s as though the critics were blind to the enormous character assassination that was happening to Clinton on a daily basis. On the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions gathered around the world to protest his policies. A newscaster asked, ‘Where was this energy before the election?’”

Clinton lost, Bordo said, “because of a slender but critical mass of voters” who decided late for Trump — after the second Comey announcement — or voted third party or didn’t vote at all. Most were “hardworking people with little time to research facts, and trusted the morning and evening news.” That segment included “white, middle-class, suburban women who’d seen Clinton caricatured as untrustworthy, a self-centered elitist who didn’t understand the problems of ordinary people,” as well as “rust-belt men who learned from fragmentary sound-bites that Clinton was a corporate shill who had proposed putting coalminers out of business—rather than an honest candidate describing an economic reality.”

For the many of us still shell-shocked by this unrecognizable America, Bordo’s book offers a clear analysis of how a candidate who received the overwhelming majority of the popular vote, did not win the presidency.

“Until Trump actually won,” said Bordo,

many young, straight, white women may have believed that the rights they had enjoyed all their lives were somehow secure. The election woke them up, and propelled them to become a part of the resistance that Blacks, immigrants, and LGBTQ citizens were already engaged in — because they always knew safety was an illusion. If that resistance remains as diverse and committed as those first post-inauguration protests it will change the landscape of American politics.

Perhaps change has come already — since election day, according to Emily’s List, close to 13,000 Democratic women are ready to run for office and 7,000 have signed up to help them win.

Click here for more articles on the Forward.

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My father, David Mark Olds (born David Moses Goldstein), was an Army Captain in WWII. He grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with so much anti-Semitism in the world that he changed his name.

Dad’s barrel chest expanded when he told battle stories: “The smell of rotted flesh” and “seeing corpses stacked like cordwood,” at Dachau. He stood taller when he said, “It was a just war. I was proud to fight.”

I’d never seen my father cry until my older sister married a German. Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Dad tried to accept his daughter’s choice to marry a non-Jew in the country he loathed. It pained him every time we visited her in the country he bravely defended against. Germans had murdered everyone in his family except his Russian parents who’d been sent to America, both at age 16.

This year, pre-election stress made me flee Manhattan for a week to be with my sister and nieces in their tiny rural town near Frankfurt. We spoke of ways the world had changed—a female running for president, a Jew as her Democratic runner-up.

We also spoke of America’s version of Hitler: Trump, the man who memorized Hitler’s speeches. Adolf shouted to crowds, “Make Germany great again!,” while here in my homeland, Trump changed only one word.

My father was a registered Democrat. He said, “People fought for your right to vote.” He taught me never to discriminate against any religion or skin color: “Most people secretly hold prejudices but you must always act with fairness.” Honesty and honor were my father’s signature attributes and he put family first.

See Also: WWII Army Captain Describes Horrors at Dachau

It’s a dangerous time now for everyone. Right-wing politicians in Europe are all cheering. The polls said Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning. If I cried to my father, “How could this be happening?,” Dad would’ve put his arms around me and said what he always did, “People lie in polls. They say what they think others want to hear. They tell the pollsters they read The New York Times, while they buy the New York Post.”

For years, he lamented what happened to the pure jazz radio station he was president of. There weren’t enough listeners to sell the advertising needed to keep it going. “People say they love pure jazz because they like to feel sophisticated. The truth is they only want commercial jazz.”

Perhaps that is a partial explanation for how off the media outlets were about this presidential race. Of course Trump is not Hitler and now that the world has seen the devastation such a demagogue can inflict, my Dad would tell me that I mustn’t fear the worst. “Worrying will wear you down to a frazzle,” he’d say.

“Always take the high road,” Dad said. He taught me to stand strong in the face of adversity. So now, if I appeal to my best self, I can summon optimism that our president-elect will grow into the office and be a more honorable president than he ever seemed as a candidate or reality TV star.

We must believe that Trump will not be able to undo all of the good that people like my father fought for.

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AFTER GOING ON a 13-city national tour, and with just seven days until the Presidential election, monologuist, actor and author Mike Daisey returned to New York for one final performance of The Trump Card.

Daisey has spent 19 years performing theatrical monologues on social themes. His career took off in 2001 when he performed 21 Dog Years, his comedic nonfiction tale of tech culture and dotcom horrors, at the New York International Fringe Festival and followed it up with a book. By 2011, it was soaring thanks to The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, an expose on deplorable working conditions in Apple’s factories in China. But everything came crashing down after his story was featured on This American Life in 2012; two months after the initial air date, TAL dedicated an entire episode to retracting the story after learning that Daisey had lied and dramatized the most moving parts of the monologue. After a cagey, almost Trumpian nonapology apology, he copped to lying in a sincere-sounding mea culpa on his blog.

Now quick to clarify that he’s an artist, not a journalist, Daisey explains what he sees as his job: “Observing my culture, seeing what it’s doing and creating theatrical commentary.”

Seated behind a wooden desk onstage, with only a glass of water and notes, Daisey appears unpretentious and nonthreatening. Then he opens his mouth. “You, my friends, are fucked.” If you expected a riotous ripping apart of the Republican nominee, prepare for a more subtle analysis of the man himself as well as the “liberal, fairly wealthy, white” audience that Daisey says helped create Trump.

The monologue explores the totality of Trump—person, performer, politician— and it changes with the news. Most days, nothing of note happens (“If Trump says something offensive, that just means it’s Tuesday,” says Daisey), but the leak of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” did affect the show. “It required extensive rewrites because people finally woke up to the person that Trump has been the entire time,” he says. “I want to thank whoever it was that leaked that tape. [Trump] was always a misogynist who sexually assaults women; we just didn’t see it. The election tears the veil off. The truth is that these are not normal times. The water is coming over the levees in both directions, and people don’t like it because it’s painful.”

Daisey gives us a mesmerizing show with a message: Americans, accept that there will always be Trumps. What matters is honestly looking at the voters and public who helped get him so close to the presidency. ■

Dorri Olds • The Trump Card, Town Hall, Tues, Nov. 1 at 8pm (townhall.com). $50.

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