America is the sow that eats her own farrow. An imperfect woman of talent has been routed by a tin-pot, camp bully.

In my unquiet sleep these last days, I have found myself tossing about, between macro and micro. I am deeply concerned by how Trump will change the world; because he will change it, and for the worse.

And I fret for a diminutive woman named Hillary Clinton.

There she was. Towering. Powerful. Tenacious. Courageous. And then suddenly, she was nowhere. The gone-ness of her ‘gone‘ upsets me – the natural consequence of losing, or, in her own deflecting term being ‘setback’. 

Hillary’s absence does not feel natural. Because I was preparing to have her stabilising presence in the polito-sphere for years. Many years!

And now this.

She would be galled, I’m sure, to know that so many people worry for her welfare, and her pain. Indeed the HRC narrative is turned. Its arc now carries the cloying, bitter trace of tragedy.

She would denounce such a characterisation, of course. And rightfully so. I am more indulgent. I do not. Because here’s how it goes: our collective concern for America and the world will only grow over the coming months as The Orange Menace hits his stride. But our care for Hillary is set, inevitably, to diminish.

Now is the natural moment for me to stand with her. Let it be fleeting, but let it be felt. Because this inspirational, iconic woman whose core failure as a politician was an inability to humanly connect is soon to have little left to give but her own humanity. She will be ‘sun-setted’, as a Floridian colleague once said to me, describing a brand withdrawn from the market.

I do not mean so literally. She has many passions and much work left to do. Yet, her ambition to effect change on the grand scale she once envisaged is no longer possible.

How is Hillary Clinton to understand the savage reality of this vote? This person who committed herself to fighting for human rights all her adult life, only to find that she would be vilified, criminalised and ultimately mortified by the very nation which raised her to be exactly who she was?

America is the sow that eats her own farrow. An imperfect woman of talent has been routed by a tin-pot, camp bully. And her own nation will rake over the coals of her candidacy, mock its inevitability, until, bored and disconsolate, it finds another brazen hussy to maul.