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Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“A Psalm of Life”
SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING GAINED
She held court like a queen. As I watched Joni Mitchell at the Grammys in 2024—singing from a lavish armchair that looked like a golden throne and, as one critic put it, “wielding a cane like a scepter”—the word that kept coming to mind was “regal.” Mitchell was eighty years old, and in 2015, she had suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm that left her virtually unable to speak, let alone sing. Yet she fought back, and now here she was, performing her spellbinding song “Both Sides Now.” Many of the music world’s biggest stars listened in rapt attention. At home, I too was on the edge of my seat.
I’ve been a Joni Mitchell fan since the 1960s. There were two wonderful early versions of “Both Sides Now,” one from Mitchell, who wrote the song, and a cover by the great Judy Collins. I thought both were terrific, although at that point I had more questions than answers about life and I didn’t really know what it meant to be in love. It was still a few years before I would meet the tall, red-bearded law student who couldn’t stop talking about Arkansas. But I was the right age to be captivated by a song about how the passage of time can bring a new perspective on life and love.
It was a heady, anguished, exhilarating time to be a college student. The Vietnam War was raging. Protests for peace, civil rights, and social justice were swelling. The innocence and illusions of childhood were falling away. “Tears and fears and feeling proud,” as the song goes. Like so many in my generation, my eyes had been opened to a darker side of American life, to injustice, corruption, assassinations, and war. At Wellesley College and then Yale Law School, I joined protests and marches, read everything I could get my hands on, and stayed up late into the night discussing the fate of the world with my classmates. Some days it felt as if looking “at life from both sides now” gave me enormous clarity—about right and wrong and what it would take to make progress; other days, it just felt confusing. When Mitchell sang, “I really don’t know life at all,” she was speaking for many of us. The mix of emotions she captured felt so specific to our time and place, but also timeless. Most young people leaving behind adolescence and grappling with adulthood have felt some version of it.
Later, Mitchell came to occupy a special place in my family’s life. In 1978, I was walking down the King’s Road in the Chelsea neighborhood of London with Bill (who looked less like a Viking but was still quite excited about Arkansas), when we heard Judy Collins’s cover of Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” wafting from one of the storefronts. Bill started singing along. “If we ever have a daughter, we should name her Chelsea,” he said. Two years later we did.
We had our share of “dreams and schemes and circus crowds.” Then one day I looked up and I was seventy-six. There was Joni Mitchell again, singing on my television, her voice deeper and world-weary but unmistakably hers. The old words took on new meaning. Gone was the twentysomething shaking off the rose-colored glasses of a love affair and the illusions of adolescence, and in her place was a matriarch reflecting on the hard-earned wisdom of a long, eventful life.
Oh, but now old friends, they’re acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed
Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day.
It felt like I was listening with new ears, almost as if I were hearing the song for the first time.
Personally and professionally I’ve come through so many highs and lows, times when I felt on top of the world and others when I was in a deep, dark hole. After all these years, I really have looked at life and love “from both sides now.” How do you tally up and reckon with the losses and gains of a life? Or of a nation and a world? These are questions with often incomplete, unsatisfying, or missing answers.
Old wounds still hurt, but I have a new sense of proportion. Time will do that. I look back on things that used to feel monumental, existential even, with clearer, calmer eyes. Rivals like the Bushes and the Obamas have become friends. The cut-and-parry of politics matters less, but the check-and-balance of democracy matters more. And little moments now loom large. Hugging my daughter, holding my husband’s hand, making my grandchildren laugh with a silly knock-knock joke, going for long walks and afternoon swims. Glorious grandmother days with “ice cream castles in the air / And feather canyons everywhere.”
But loss is also an ever-present companion. “So many things I would have done / But clouds got in my way.”
On the afternoon of Thursday, May 30, 2024, I was sitting at the desk in my little home office in Washington editing this book. I had the sound turned off on my phone so I could concentrate. But when I picked it up to check the time, I saw the breaking news alert that Donald Trump had been convicted of thirty-four felonies related to election fraud in 2016. I put down my pen, took a deep breath, and felt tears in my eyes. There was a jolt of disbelief that he had been held accountable for interfering in the election. A pang of vindication. It was now beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had committed serious crimes in order to win. He was exactly who we thought he was. But with vindication also came sorrow, because nothing can change what happened or the damage done since, and it’s far from clear that his conviction will be enough to prevent him from returning to power. Sorrow because our country deserves better than this disgrace.
That’s not all. Since 2016, people have asked me, “Will you ever be able to move on?” Move on? I wish. History has its hold on me, on all of us. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I live with it every day. And every day I make an effort to turn my eyes to the future instead.
I closed the breaking news alert and exchanged a few funny tweets and memes with friends over text. “Did you know Donald Trump is the first actor from the movie Home Alone 2 to be convicted of 34 felonies?” I laughed, picked up my pen, and got back to work. That evening I had to appear at an event for women’s rights. I started my remarks by asking, “Anything going on today?” The audience roared with a kind of catharsis.
People also ask if I reveled in schadenfreude when Trump was impeached (twice), defeated, indicted in four different cases, and now convicted of thirty-four felonies. Schadenfreude is one of those long German words with a very specific meaning: “Finding joy in the troubles of others.” Not particularly admirable, but quite human. Scholars like Tiffany Watt Smith have traced similar concepts across cultures and languages. The French call it joie maligne. In Japan they say, “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.”
Whenever Trump suffers some new humiliation, memes pop up on social media with me laughing, sipping champagne, or flashing a knowing smile. My favorite is the photo taken by the great Barb Kinney of President Obama and me backstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We’re sitting in two black chairs pulled close together. Barack, usually restrained and self-controlled, is doubled over with laughter. I’ve just shared something so funny I could barely get through it. I wish I could remember what it was. Fortunately, countless internet users have come up with their own captions, many of them about Trump. Like: “And then he said, ‘No one has more respect for women than I do.’ ”
It would be funnier if it weren’t so awful.
Was there even a tiny bit of schadenfreude when I heard about the verdict in New York? I won’t say no. But the truth is that I felt more relief than pleasure seeing the rule of law prevail, even briefly. And surprise. During the trial, I had tried not to pay much attention. Trump has spent his entire life avoiding accountability; I didn’t think this time would be different. And the whole thing was just so sordid and painful. There was the national disgrace—not so much the spectacle of a former president on trial but the fact that this criminal was president in the first place. There was also the opening of old wounds. Prosecutors made the case that Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” Pundits seeking to distract from these damning allegations claimed these were mere bookkeeping errors—victimless crimes. But there were victims. A fraud was committed against the American people, against all of us.
Trump committed election fraud because he was convinced that a late-breaking scandal would have sunk his campaign. Was he right? Did his criminal conspiracy tip the outcome? Here’s what I can tell you: the 2016 election was decided by 77,744 votes out of a total 136 million cast. If news about Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels had caused just forty thousand people across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to change their minds, I would have won. It’s no wonder that on election night, one of the lawyers who had negotiated the hush money cover-up deal texted his counterpart: “What have we done?”
Even now, just thinking about that moment makes fury well up in my chest. I’m glad the crimes have been exposed and the truth is known. But as long as he remains within striking distance of the White House, the dominant emotion I feel is dread—plus determination to do all I can to stop him.
People often say to me, “You warned us, and I wish we had listened.” What am I supposed to say to that? Yes, I did warn you. Yes, I said Trump was a con man, a Russian puppet, and a threat to democracy. I warned that he would end abortion rights, inflame our divisions, and botch every crisis he faced. I take no pleasure in being right. In fact, I hate it.
In Greek mythology, there was a woman named Cassandra who was blessed by being able to see the future but cursed to never be believed. She tried to warn the Trojans that Greek invaders were hiding in the giant horse they were pulling inside their gates, but no one listened. In 2016, that’s how it felt. I tried to raise the alarm in every way I could, but the media and many in the political establishment dismissed me as overwrought, even hysterical. They didn’t take Trump seriously. Or literally. They thought I was trying to distract from the real issue: my emails. And they were convinced I would win, so it didn’t matter.
At a recent event, a retired senior FBI official came up to me and apologized for the way the bureau mishandled the investigation into my emails. He wanted me to know how sorry he was that he hadn’t stopped Jim Comey, the FBI director who trashed me in public and foolishly announced that he was reopening the investigation just days before the election. I stared at him for a minute, trying to contain my anger. You’re sorry? Now? Finally, I said, “I would have been a great president,” and walked away.
Cassandra wasn’t drinking champagne as Troy burned. She was miserable.
People sometimes ask if I’ll ever run for president again. I will admit that I was tempted during Trump’s disastrous presidency. I knew I could do a better job for America. I never doubted my capability, and I still had the desire to do it—what politicos call “the fire in the belly.” Third time’s the charm, right? But I knew in my head that the answer, in my case, was no. I had my shot. It was time to pass the baton and move on.
