Greed. The first and only issue is money. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was funded by Wall Street. She took more corporate money than any other candidate in history. She had unprecedented support from mainstream corporate media. She convinced 33 state parties to raise funds on her behalf to circumvent campaign finance limits. She ran a family “foundation” that raised over $20 million dollars of foreign donations while she was Secretary of State. These “strengths” poisoned her candidacy at every level.

The big money behind her meant that she had no credibility to speak to ordinary American’s concerns on regulation, trade, jobs, or the economy in general. She never articulated passionate concern or a vision for the average person. She couldn’t credibly criticize her own donor’s bad business practices. She may have mentioned jobs in passing about a million times, but couldn’t connect to working class voters. And she spent an appalling amount of time doing private big dollar fundraisers with economic elites including Hollywood celebrities while people like Trump and Sanders were holding rallies with thousands of ordinary Americans in attendance.

During the campaign Hillary famously said “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of work” and “We’re going to raise taxes on the middle class.” She gave a speech on income inequality while wearing a $7,500 Armani Jacket. During the campaign the public was reminded that Hillary Clinton hasn’t driven a car in over 20 years, owns several mansions, and her ability to relate to ordinary economically down-trodden people is limited to stunts like “I’m your abuela” “I carry hot sauce in my purse” and other cringe-worthy pandering.

Then Wikileaks revealed that she was also privately telling the banks “I think that your role in the housing crisis was unfair politicized blaming and the borrowers should be the ones held accountable” and “My dream is open borders with unlimited free trade” and “You have to have a private position and a public position.”

The inherent contradictions between running as “the most progressive” Democrat versus her funding sources and policy positions was ridiculous on its face. She was rightly perceived as a cold, calculating, and dishonest, and she wrongly assumed voters would forget about her history of flip flopping on trade deals (Korea, Panama, TPP, etc.), hyper aggressive foreign policy, and cozy ties to the worst of Wall Street’s criminal sleaze.

It was and is obvious that she was assuming a 1990s era media climate when people were more easily bamboozled by TV and didn’t have the Internet. She saw no problem saying “I’m the most liberal” and within 10 days saying “I’m a moderate.” This is not because she lacks intelligence, but due to her living a sheltered existence insulated inside a cocoon of money and self-delusion.

Clinton made clear that she believed having more money guaranteed her the win. She never crafted a coherent message (“I’m with her?” “Love Trumps hate?”). She didn’t even bother to show up to union halls in Michigan or even bother to visit Wisconsin. She never made a good effort to unite the party after sewing up the nomination. She apparently believed that she could peal off Trump supporters by appealing to “moderate” Republicans. She wrote off the entire white working class and even proactively alienated them by calling Sanders supporters losers living in their mothers’ basements and 1/2 of Trump’s supporters “deplorable and irredeemable.”

Then there was her opponent, Bernie Sanders, who demonstrated that you can run a credible and well-funded campaign solely on small donations, with no super PAC money, and instead trade on the currency of sincere concern for the voters. Bernie’s virtues laid Hillary’s vices bare for all to see. But because Hillary was able to skate by on large donor fundraising, and was the darling of the party’s moneyed elites, she did not listen to what all the millions of small donors to Bernie Sanders were saying — among other things “Bernie or bust!”

As if that weren’t enough, there was the fact that she was under investigation from the Obama DOJ and FBI and a defendant in a FOIA lawsuit. All of that ultimately stemmed from her choice to run a private family “foundation” while Secretary of State and use a private insecure e-mail server to cover up the fact that she was commingling private and public business. It was no surprise then that she quickly became disliked by the majority of Americans and perceived by a 2/3 majority to be dishonest.

It is no trivial matter that most Americans saw her “foundation” as a pay-to-play scheme and money laundering front. It was and is an insult to people’s intelligence to expect them to believe otherwise while the Clintons went from leaving the Whitehouse “broke” to now controlling over $3 BILLION in “charitable” funds that according to their own reports are rife with over 200 conflicts of interest, used to pay for their exorbitant personal costs like travel, cushy jobs for “friends,” “an expectation of quid pro quo benefits” and apparently also Chelsea’s wedding.

Likewise it was completely insane for Democrats to even consider running a consummate insider like Hillary Clinton in a change election, but they basically had no choice because the Clinton machine had so entrenched itself into the party’s money streams. Their influence was to burrowed in, extreme, and cultish that dissenting Berniecrats like Tulsi Gabbard were threatened with being cut off by Hollywood and other big money donors.

So at the end of the day, this election was a story about greed, overreaching, and how the love of money corrodes your soul. If the Democrats don’t own this and atone, they will never amount to anything more than a watered down version of the Republican party, consigned to wander the political wastelands on their way towards history’s ash heap.