'What More Do You Need?'

There’s an anecdote Hillary Clinton tells about the frenzied run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, campaigning with Joe Biden in his swing-state-set hometown. She noticed a woman staring at her—with more intensity than even Hillary Clinton is used to being stared at by members of the public. The woman finally approached her. She’d been gazing at Clinton, she explained, out of confusion. “I’d read you’d gained 130 pounds!”

It was a Kinsley gaffe whose truth was revealed not by the politician, but about her: Many people will believe pretty much anything about the former first lady/senator/secretary of state/presidential candidate. In her, the demands of American celebrity and the dynamics of American politics have mingled in an extremely targeted form of magical thinking. Whatever Hillary Clinton might do, a hefty chunk of people will assume its nefariousness. Whatever she might say, a significant portion of the populace will simply assume she is lying: Lady Macbeth, in the age of alternative facts. Is her marriage a sham? Is she sick with a chronic disease? Did she kill Vince Foster? Is she, just under those perfectly pressed pantsuits, hiding the scales of a reptile?

“I’m a Rorschach test,” Clinton , during the 2008 presidential primaries, and she was correct. The trouble, for all involved, is that she is also a human, with the moral and emotional freight the designation implies. Clinton may be a vessel for this moment’s internet-fueled iteration of the paranoid style; she feels them, though, those accusations flung in her direction. Once, when Clinton was the first lady, a staffer’s Marc Fisher —or, rather, mishearing it—“Clinton’s eyes filled with tears.” She asked the staffer, “It really says I had sex with a collie?”