Hillary Clinton stopped by The Tonight Show Wednesday to chat with Jimmy Fallon about her book What Happened, which delves into the 2016 presidential election to unpack the reasons why she lost and why Donald Trump won. Of course, it’s difficult to talk about her book without bringing up election night itself, which Fallon did by joking, “No spoilers, but you won’t even believe the end.”
Clinton relayed the wave of emotion she experienced as she gradually realized that she had lost the election. “But then by the end of the night, by midnight, and we saw what was happening in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, look — I was devastated,” she recalled. “And I was, not just because I wanted to win and I wanted to be president and do the work of being president, but because I was so worried as to what it meant to have my opponent win,” she said, artfully dodging Trump’s name. “So it was a really tough night.”
When asked if she would have felt differently had she lost to a different Republican, Clinton said that she’s thought about it a lot, and she would have. “Look, if I had lost to another Republican, somebody who I disagreed with, but who I thought was temperamentally capable of being president, who would take the job and the awesome responsibility, of course I’d be disappointed,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be so worried about my country and the world as I am now, when I see what’s going on every single day.”
On that note, Clinton said she thinks a lot about what she would do differently if she were president, such as in regards to the disaster response in Puerto Rico, following Trump’s lackluster response. After a few days of inaction from the White House, she said, “So I tweeted, I tweeted at the president, and the secretary of defense and the defense department, and I basically implored them to send naval assets, including the hospital ship.”
“And it took a few more days, and then finally they did. It’s hard to figure out, what are the priorities, if three-and-a-half million Americans — and Puerto Ricans are Americans, let’s make sure people remember that,” she noted, to thunderous applause from the audience. “If they aren’t the highest priority of your government in responding to such a terrible natural disaster, what are you people spending your time doing? Right? Golfing, tweeting, watching cable TV?”
On a lighter note, Clinton also talked about Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin’s Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live performances of herself and her opponent, joking that McKinnon “is actually a better me than I am.” “I wish I had her talent, she’s just an amazing person,” she complimented the comedian. “And she sat there playing Hallelujah, that was hard. That was really hard.” For her and a lot of people watching, as well.