New excerpt from upcoming Hillary Clinton memoir: Trump made ‘my skin crawl’

Stephen Barr
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read
Cosmopolitan via GETTY

“What happened?” is the question many Americans are still asking months after the historic night of November 8, 2016 — the night in which Donald J. Trump, a businessman outsider with no political experience, was elected president of the United States.

With a new memoir, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, attempts to explain this very question with her aptly titled book, “What Happened” — question mark omitted.

“For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history,” reads the book’s synopsis. “Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet.”

In a new excerpt from the book, read by Clinton herself and obtained by MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Clinton shares what was going on in her head when Trump infamously stood directly behind her as she was answering a question during the second presidential debate on October 9, 2016.

“‘This is not O.K.,’ I thought. It was the second presidential debate and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled,” the excerpt read.

Secretary Clinton then poses a question to the reader, “Well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry-on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly ‘back up you creep, get away from me! I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”

Of course, Hillary Clinton chose the first option — adding to the list of questionable decisions that Clinton now begrudgingly looks back on and writes about in this book.

Promising to describe “what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes [Clinton] made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward,” “What Happened” is set to be 512 pages and is due out September 12.

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