Hillary decided she had to make good on her concession speech by attending Trump’s inauguration. I agreed and off we went for root canals without painkillers. It was classic Trump. He gave a brief ungenerous nod to Obama, didn’t acknowledge Hillary, and gave a dark inaugural address to a nice-sized crowd but nowhere near what he claimed or pushed the National Park Service to estimate, and smaller than the crowds in 1993 and 2009. Away from the cameras, the newly minted president thanked Hillary and me for coming.
Then we went home. As we turned into our short cul-de-sac, I thought of how our neighbors had decorated the entrance after the election with signs, notes, and flowers expressing love and support for Hillary. Some of them were still there. I was grateful to live in a county where Hillary had run ahead of the party registration, a place with good schools, libraries, parks, and nature preserves, filled with immigrants and native-born residents working and raising families side-by-side.
Despite the success of the demonize, divide, and dominate strategy, I went back to work trying to prove my neighbors were a better model for the future. I started 2017 by checking in with the foundation’s major donors to make sure they were still with us, and urging President Bush to nail down GOP congressional support for PEPFAR before Trump could cut it, which sure enough he tried to do.
By the end of 2017, James Patterson and I had finished our book The President Is Missing. I had read hundreds of thrillers over the last forty-plus years and was excited to be working on one with the writer who’d penned the most best-sellers of them all. After our agent, Bob Barnett, got us together, we had to figure out how to do it. Jim asked me what I wanted to write about. I said I wanted to tell readers about the dangers of cyberattacks that go well beyond election meddling. Then he said, “I’m a storyteller. I want the president to go missing.” I laughed and said it’s harder for the president to go missing than the conspiracy spreaders think and so we’d need a believable plot line that required him to be alone to meet with the only person who could prevent a cyberattack. We started with those two ideas.
I learned a lot about thriller writing from Patterson, and really enjoyed working with him. We agreed on an outline, then he gave me about twenty questions that needed answering so we could make the White House meetings and the mechanics of the president going missing as realistic as possible. I worked on the questions and he sent me a draft of the first two chapters to review. Then we went back and forth with drafts until the end. The only thing he said I’d have to do by myself was the president’s speech to the country near the end of the book.
Hillary and I like spending time with Jim and his wife, Sue. They are both ardent and good golfers. Between them they have more than a dozen holes-in-one. Sue’s probably a better golfer but Jim has more aces. He’s a competitive rascal. More important, they’re serious philanthropists who promote universal reading with gifts to independent bookstores, including checks directly to their employees, support for effective school reading programs, and books given directly to kids and their parents. He’s way ahead of me on that, but our foundation’s partnership with Scholastic and others has allowed Too Small to Fail to put more than a million books into the hands of kids and their parents. We had a good time writing and promoting The President Is Missing, which became the bestselling novel of 2018.
Starting in February 2018, we did book signings, interviews with the press and with other mystery writers, and some TV interviews. The last one, on June 3, was NBC’s Today show, with Craig Melvin, who had just transferred from MSNBC. He asked straightforward questions that Jim and I fielded for about 40 percent of the interview. We also discussed North Korea and the upcoming meeting between Trump and President Kim. Then Melvin asked, with the reckoning of the MeToo movement, if the same thing that triggered my impeachment had happened today, would I resign? I said no, because the impeachment process was not legitimate and had to be fought. Then he read from Monica Lewinsky’s column about how the MeToo movement changed her view of sexual harassment and asked if I felt differently now.
I said, “No, I felt terrible then.” “Did you ever apologize to her?” I said that I had apologized to her and everybody else I wronged. I was caught off guard by what came next. “But you didn’t apologize to her, at least according to folks that we’ve talked to.” I fought to contain my frustration as I replied that while I’d never talked to her directly, I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.
The interview was not my finest hour. I was prepared to be asked why I hadn’t apologized to Monica in person, but not to be accused of not apologizing at all. Melvin was barely in his teens when all this happened and probably hadn’t been properly briefed. Regardless, it’s always better to save your anger for what happens to other people, not yourself.
The network soon included a clip of me speaking to faith leaders at the White House in 1999, apologizing to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family, and to the American people. I meant it then and I mean it today. I live with it all the time. Monica’s done a lot of good and important work over the last few years in her campaign against bullying, earning her well-deserved recognition in the United States and abroad. I wish her nothing but the best.
Meanwhile, the country was entering a post-truth era, and Trump was making the most of it. His cabinet was full of people with clear conflicts of interest, but he didn’t care until they refused to obey his latest command because it was illegal or would destroy their reputations. Trump, his family, and many of his top aides also conducted official business on their personal cell phones, sometimes in public.
Thankfully, the people he assigned to renegotiate NAFTA took it seriously and basically updated the original agreement, which needed doing after almost twenty-five years. He didn’t seem to care about the details. He just wanted to put a different title on the deal and proclaim it a vast improvement over the “worst trade deal in history.” President López Obrador of Mexico and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau played along.
For Trump it was all about branding, erasing factual history with new myths. His tax bill was a big wet kiss to corporate America, with no requirement to share the benefits with their workers or use the money to make more investments in the United States. When I raised the corporate rate in 1993 to 35 percent, that was the average rate paid in advanced economies. By 2017, everybody else had lowered their rates. We needed to keep up with our competitors, but Trump’s 21 percent rate was below the average in advanced economies and made no effort to close gaping loopholes which allowed many large corporations to shelter billions from paying any tax at all.
In 2022, the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act turned the tide a bit, with a 15 percent minimum tax, but Congress wouldn’t go along with the fix we need, and President Biden supports: a global 15 percent minimum. Nations would still be free to have different rates, but big corporations couldn’t move operations to lower-tax countries or put money in tax havens and get off scot-free. According to news reports, big companies used most of Trump’s tax cuts for stock buybacks and top management pay hikes, increasing inequality. Not exactly what he promised.
It didn’t matter too much, politically. The years 2017–2019 were pretty good for the country economically, with economic growth that had begun ever so slowly in 2009, but picked up steam in President Obama’s second term, helped by his policies and the significant minimum wage increases passed in several states. Trump was lucky again—even though job growth in his first two years was actually less than in President Obama’s last two years, people finally began to feel it in rising incomes, with the benefits more widely shared, thanks in part to the state minimum wage hikes and a resurgent union movement.
In May 2017, Trump fired Jim Comey just four years into his ten-year term as FBI director. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, whom President Obama had appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland, wrote a short bulletproof memo citing Comey’s two violations of decades of FBI policy in 2016: his public statement on July 5 smearing three hundred State Department employees, including Hillary, for following long-standing State Department procedures; and his public announcement of reopening the email investigation right before the election.
Trump should have left it there. But he couldn’t. He actually wanted Comey gone for two other reasons: his presence was a constant reminder of what really got him to the White House, and he wanted Comey to kill the investigation into whether Putin had worked to defeat Hillary, efforts already confirmed in 2016 by the Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson. Comey’s unleashing the dogs of war on Hillary and apparently dragging his feet on Putin’s interference until after the election wasn’t enough for Trump to keep him.
Trump set Comey up when he pressured him to let the investigation of General Michael Flynn go after hugging him at a White House meeting covered on national TV. Comey was clearly uncomfortable. But Trump wasn’t. He soon fired him and later said he did it because the Russia investigation would interfere with his ability to work with Putin.
President Trump also kept his promise to move the Supreme Court to the right with the appointment of Federalist Society favorite Neil Gorsuch to the court fourteen months after the vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia. President Obama had nominated Judge Merrick Garland, now attorney general, who earlier had been confirmed by a large bipartisan majority to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on Garland, saying the Scalia vacancy was too close to the election—eight months away—and should be decided by the voters. To confirm Gorsuch, McConnell had to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, which he had recently agreed not to do when he accepted the bipartisan compromise ending it only for judges below the Supreme Court.
Hillary and I started 2018 with a trip to Hawaii. We stayed on the Big Island and got together with our old friend, former governor John Waihee, the first native Hawaiian elected to lead the state. After he finished two terms, John continued his efforts to promote Hawaii’s history and culture, including teaching more young people to speak their native tongue. We visited a group of them who welcomed us with a Hawaiian song and showed us their project, a giant raft made like those that Pacific Islanders had first sailed to then-unsettled Hawaii about sixteen hundred years ago, navigating solely by the stars and ocean currents. The young people were also learning to navigate without instruments, a skill we could all use at times.
Not long after we returned home, I met another remarkable group of young people. I attended Town & Country’s Philanthropy Summit to introduce two survivors of the Parkland school shooting and two students from Chicago who had founded an anti-gun-violence group that also was lobbying for stronger gun safety laws. The Chicago group leaders represented inner-city Black kids who had long been at risk of gun violence. They lived in one of the five of Chicago’s fifty wards where violent crime had increased over the last few years. The Parkland kids were leading a more racially, ethnically, and economically mixed group which had been activated by the deadly shooting at their own school.
I thought that these impressive young people’s call to action had the potential to finally make it an issue for the voters who supported sensible gun safety laws but, so far, not with the same intensity as the opponents of any sensible regulations, like fully comprehensive background checks and a new assault weapons ban, or at least a reenactment of the ten-bullet ammunition clip limit.
These students and others like them had a chance to actually move voters, if we could keep them in the news. I was glad to help. The kids were great and made their case, although we’d have to suffer through more mass shootings, including the tragedy at Uvalde, when a teenager with an AR-15 killed nineteen children and two teachers when there were nearly four hundred armed lawmen nearby who did nothing. Uvalde finally prompted the Senate Republicans to support some modest improvements, but it was still not enough. In late 2023 in Lewiston, Maine, a mentally ill Army reservist killed eighteen people and wounded thirteen more after local law enforcement had been warned by his son, his ex-wife, and members of his Army Reserve unit that he was unstable and threatening to kill a lot of people. Authorities said state law required them to take him into custody, but they couldn’t find him. The new GOP Speaker, Mike Johnson, said the killings were “a problem of the human heart.” Since we have by far the highest mass-murder rate of any wealthy country in the world, does he mean that he thinks we have the darkest, hardest hearts on earth? Go figure.
On June 25, I went to Kennebunkport for what proved to be my last summer lunch with George H. W. Bush. He was frail but still had his sense of humor, wearing dark blue socks with a drawing of me on them. He was clearly still missing Barbara, who had passed away just a couple of months earlier. We had a good time, but I missed Barbara being there, too. She kept us all on our toes with her quick wit and no-nonsense wisdom. George didn’t say much, but he didn’t miss much, either. I could tell he knew his life was winding down and he wanted to finish it with family and friends, being gracious and grateful, with a smile on his face.
On July 10, I represented both of us at the renaming of two buildings on the campus of the U.S. Peace Institute in Washington for George and me. Both older buildings had been renovated to house a meeting space and peace tech lab. They’re now respectable additions to the magnificent main building designed by the wonderful Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, whose work includes Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and Crystal Bridges, the museum of American Art in northwest Arkansas. I was honored to support the project and liked the thought of being connected with George when we’re both gone. I really miss him now, and whether the Republicans acknowledge it or not, they do, too. He was a tough campaigner, but when the elections were over, he governed in a way that left the door open for honorable compromise.
The rest of 2018 was dominated by two political stories. President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, another Federalist Society choice, to the Supreme Court, and he was confirmed 50–48–1 after a contentious hearing, the tone of which was set by Kavanaugh’s assertion in his opening statement that “what goes around comes around.” Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell sure hoped so. In the nineties, Ken Starr and his henchmen implied that Hillary and I had something to do with our friend Vince Foster’s death. After the previous special counsel, a respected Republican prosecutor, Robert Fiske, had already concluded that Vince’s cause of death was suicide brought on by depression, Brett Kavanaugh aided Starr in reopening the issue, making Vince’s death an “open question” and forcing the Foster family to relive their nightmare for three more long years. It was awful. I hope no one else ever has to go through anything like it when what goes around comes around.
The other big event turned out better for the Democrats. The efforts of the White House and the GOP Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering a remotely acceptable alternative made it clear that they were willing to take away coverage or explode the cost of healthcare for millions of people by ending the ban on charging people with preexisting conditions more for insurance, and by eliminating the Medicaid expansion that gave millions of poor people healthcare coverage and provided premium subsidies for millions more working families with limited incomes.
The voters noticed and gave Democrats the largest popular vote victory in the 2018 midterm elections in more than a century, 8.6 percent, leading to a net gain of forty-one seats in the House. The popular vote margin was larger than in the big Democratic losses in 1994 and 2010, but Democrats gained fewer seats because of reapportionment, gerrymandering, and efforts to make it harder for heavily Democratic areas to vote. The Republicans actually picked up two Senate seats, thanks to where the open seats were. Still, the victory was enough to save the Affordable Care Act, thanks to Senator John McCain’s decisive vote, and give the Democrats hope for 2020. I was especially happy with Donna Shalala’s victory in South Florida over a GOP incumbent, a tribute to her years of good work as president of the University of Miami and a smart campaign.
In January 2019, I stopped in Las Vegas to see former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who was battling cancer but still focused on the future, determined to fight on as long as he had a breath left. After I got home, I did two long sessions with the film crew doing a documentary about Hillary. It was both exhilarating because I loved talking about her and painful because I had to relive the 2016 campaign and the problems as well as the joys of our long years together. Hillary was streamed on Hulu and did a compelling job covering her life and work. But it hurt when people who saw it said they wished America had seen that Hillary in 2015 and 2016. She was there all the time, but it’s hard to see anybody when your view of them is blocked by mud.
I also did a long interview for a film on the late King Hussein of Jordan, who, when he was desperately ill with cancer, came to Camp David in 1998 to challenge the Palestinians to make peace with Israel as he had. He also weighed in, diplomatically, on the impeachment battle, saying in a press conference that while he had worked for peace with nine U.S. presidents and liked them all, no one had done as much for peace as I had, and he hoped I would be able to finish the job. With his life ebbing away, the trip took a lot out of him. Soon I would be marching in his funeral cortege in Amman. He was a brave, good man, and a loyal friend. He was succeeded by his son Abdullah, who along with his wife, Queen Rania, a Palestinian by birth, have continued to make Jordan a voice for peace and fairness in the Middle East. They often participate in CGI, and have been uncommonly thoughtful and kind to Hillary and me.
Throughout 2018 and 2019, the Miami Herald had been publishing stories about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 had been convicted and jailed in Florida for sex crimes. In part because of that rigorous journalism, Epstein was arrested again in 2019 for those and other crimes, this time by federal authorities in New York. The Herald stories and his rearrest raised questions about several well-known people’s connection to him, including me. They deserved answers and I gave them. In 2002 and 2003, he invited me to fly on his airplane to support the work of the foundation, and in return for flying me, my staff, and my Secret Service detail who always accompanied me, Epstein asked only that I take an hour or two on each trip to discuss politics and economics. He had just donated $10 million to Harvard for brain research and he asked a lot of questions. That was the extent of our conversations. My only other interactions with Epstein were two brief meetings, one at my office in Harlem and another at his house in New York.
I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing. He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island. When it was suggested that I traveled there without my round-the-clock Secret Service detail, which would explain why there’s never been a record of me being there, in 2016 the Service took the extraordinary step of saying I had never waived protection and they had never been there. Another person reportedly said she’d seen me on the island, but that I didn’t do anything wrong. However, in early 2024, unsealed depositions showed that she’d only heard I was there but didn’t actually see me. Then there was one of my former staffers who fed the story to Vanity Fair. He knew it wasn’t true when he said it.
The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.
In May, I went to the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, to address a symposium on the presidency. I worked hard on the speech and its central argument: that all our presidents could best be understood by how they defined the two key ideas in the Preamble to the Constitution: who are “we the people” and what does a “more perfect union” mean? To support the case I went on a trip through American history, including the periods when we had strong movements to eliminate groups from “we the people” and shrink the definition of “a more perfect union,” from the end of Reconstruction to the present day, and concluded that, so far, we had ultimately rejected division and chosen what I call “inclusive tribalism” to keep moving forward.
I had seen the ongoing argument on a recent trip back to Hope, Arkansas, to do a conversation at the Chamber of Commerce dinner with two of my kindergarten classmates, Mack McClarty, my first White House chief of staff, and Joe Purvis, a gifted lawyer in my state attorney general’s office. By 2019, Trump fever had taken root in our hometown, but we had a good time saying what we thought and being well received, though it was hard to tell whether we were getting through or just being welcomed as respected relics of another time.
I also learned a lot going back to Arkansas for Alice Walton’s seventieth birthday party, my fifty-fifth high school reunion, and the two-hundredth Anniversary Dinner for the Arkansas Gazette.
The Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi and a strong voice for civil rights during the integration of Little Rock Central High School, had been sold to USA Today, which couldn’t make a go of it, then had merged with the state’s conservative paper, the Arkansas Democrat, whose deeper pockets from other media properties had put the Gazette out of business to start with.
But the Democrat-Gazette was an old-fashioned paper in a good way. The publisher, Walter Hussman Jr., would beat me up on the editorial page but generally report the news as it unfolded. Hussman was also a good friend of Vince Foster’s, and I appreciated his loyalty to our mutual friend and his unwillingness to sacrifice Vince’s memory, and the plain facts, on the altar of power worship and personal vendettas.