'What Happened': Hillary Clinton talks election loss to Trump in new tell-all

Hillary Clinton has reportedly taken sole responsibility for her “mistakes” in last year’s presidential election in a new tell-all. The former secretary of state admitted that she misjudged the political environment as well as US President Donald Trump’s campaign.

In the tell-all, she recognised that it was her campaign, and that those were her decisions. “You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want, but I was the candidate,” she writes in “What Happened,” according to CNN.

Her new upcoming book talks about her experience running for president. It is slated to be out on September 12, but some who obtained the book early have published excerpts on social media.

Clinton goes back over her shortcomings and mistakes, taking full responsibility for all of them. “I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t realise how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet,” she writes, maintaining that she ran a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies.

She also talks about controversial elements of her campaign. Among these is the bad “optics” she created through her paid speeches to Wall Street banking firms, how she regrets her comments about putting coal miners out of business and the “dumb” decision to use a private email server at the time of her tenure at the State Department, the New York Post notes.

Final hours of the 2016 election

Clinton recalls the final hours of the 2016 election, when she saw her dream of becoming the president of America come crashing down. As the results started to pour in, she took a nap as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, stood nearby.

The mood in the hotel had darkened considerably when she woke. She shares that former US President Barack Obama advised her to contact Trump and concede defeat, so as not to draw out the campaign needlessly. And that call, she said, was without a doubt one of the strangest moments of her life.

Clinton also talks about Bernie Sanders’ attacks, saying it resulted to lasting damage. She allegedly accused Sanders of paving the way for Trump's "Crooked Hillary" campaign.

She also writes that some of Sanders’ supporters, “the so-called Bernie Bros,” took to harassing her supporters online, and that Obama urged her to grit her teeth and lay off Sanders as much as she could. She says it got “ugly and more than a little sexist,” and she felt she was in a “straitjacket.”

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