Steve Dyer

Paul Ryan headed back to the locker room to get changed after a hard-core P90X workout. The first thing he saw when he walked in the door was President Hillary Clinton. She’d brought a lawn chair in from the White House, and she was sitting with her feet up on the bench, eating a panini from Au Bon Pain. Her eyes were glued to Mike Pence as he tried to change out of his gym shorts and back into his suit. He was using a towel to cover as much of his body as he could, but the towel kept slipping. “Magic Mike! Show me your Hoosier, baby!” the president shouted from her chair, wiping some kind of pesto sauce off her chin. Mike Pence’s face was red as he desperately tried to cover up, but it was a losing battle. “Not as tight as they used to be, Mike. I’m talking about your butt cheeks,” Hillary clarified.

“I know you’re talking about my butt cheeks, Madam President,” Mike Pence said, ashamed. “But I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Your butt cheeks look like two wet apple pies, governor,” Hillary said.“You’re a six, tops. And the only reason you get a six is because I like your face. If I wasn’t eating this soup right now, I’d just walk up and kiss you. I can’t help myself around you, Mike. I want to lick you like a lollipop I just got from my doctor.” She was eating a big spoonful of tomato bisque. “Have you guys ever had the soup at Au Bon Pain? It’s delicious.”

“You still get lollipops from your doctor, Madam President?” Ben Carson called out from a different part of the locker room. Hillary’s eyes now turned to look at Dr. Carson, who was still wet from the shower, almost glistening as he vigorously dried off his thick, muscular thighs.

“Oh yeah, Ben, look at your legs. Wow. Wow. Put your leg up on the bench so I can take a better look at it,” Hillary said. She leaned forward in her lawn chair. “Damn. I want to give your leg a hug.” She threw her body over Ben Carson’s muscular upper thigh and squeezed. “Hmmm, yeah, Hillie needed that,” she said softly, deeply breathing in Carson’s scent. “You smell like a Hawaiian pizza.”

Ben Carson looked desperately at Paul Ryan, wanting him to do something, anything. Paul just shrugged. What could he do? She was the president now. If she wanted to hang out in congressional locker rooms and “inspect the goods” (as she liked to say), how could anyone stop her? “Ben,” Paul Ryan whispered. “You know that if you’re in charge, you get to do whatever you want to the people beneath you. That’s what we believe.” Ben nodded. Of course that was right. How could that not be right?

Ben Carson just stood there and tried to smile as she took a deep sniff of his kneecaps. “Ohhh, I want to take a ride on these kneecaps. I want to make these kneecaps my pony. Feed them a carrot. Teach them how to dressage,” Hillary said in a deep, lustful voice as she rubbed the side of her face on Ben Carson’s leg. Ben was confused, and he whispered to Paul Ryan, “Why would a woman want to ride a man’s kneecaps? Is that a new thing women are doing?”

The truth was, it was just Hillary being Hillary. Shortly after the inauguration, she had started showing up in locker rooms all over Washington and refusing to leave. Congressmen, senators, lobbyists, powerful men were all forced to change in the bathroom stalls when they could, which meant that no one could just hang out and talk anymore. If any of the men complained, the next day they were gone. It was better to just keep your head down, move quickly, and try to get out of there, but the lawn chair and the Au Bon Pain was new. Things were getting worse.

Mike Pence was standing in front of the mirror, softly weeping. “Do you guys really think my butt cheeks look like two wet apple pies?” he asked, with fear in his voice. If he couldn’t fill out a suit anymore, then who was he? Would people still listen to him? Paul Ryan rushed over and put an arm around his friend: “Of course I don’t think that. You have a beautiful butt, Mike. You’ve got the most squeezable ass of any governor I’ve ever met. It’s like a Koosh ball. I wish I could play with it when I’m sad.”

“You’ve got the ass of a European soccer player, Mike,” Ben Carson called out. “Seriously, I’d give anything for your ass.” Mike Pence nodded and wiped away his tears. Hillary just laughed.

“You let that butt get any saggier, and you’re gonna be out of a job, pal,” she said. “Ugh. I hate when men get old. It’s so gross. It’s like watching a snowman melt. No one wants to fuck Frosty, even with the little button eyes.” She had returned to her chair by now, and she was loudly chewing on an oatmeal-raisin cookie without bothering to even take the plastic wrapper off. It was the most disgusting way to eat a cookie, and Paul Ryan could barely look at her. Women were supposed to be championed and revered, but here was a woman licking cookie crumbs off a plastic wrapper with her fly down. He had to look away when she started eating raisins off the floor. “Hmmm, floor raisins,” she said out loud to no one, then let out a fart. The smell was overpowering in the wet locker-room air. Paul Ryan’s heart was breaking.

Rudy Giuliani came out of the shower, saw Hillary, and started to search helplessly for his towel. “Looking for this?” Hillary asked, pulling a towel out from behind her back. Rudy grabbed paper towels out of the dispenser to cover himself, as Hillary started to chase him around the locker room — skipping, giggling, clapping, moving on him like a bitch. Rudy wasn’t fast enough, and pretty soon Hillary had grabbed him by the dick. “Honk! Honk!” she yelled, squeezing his penis like it was the horn of an antique car. Rudy did his best to play along; he laughed and said, “I’m married, Madam President!” Hillary wouldn’t give up. She was a fighter. “Where’s your wife?” she asked. “I don’t see her.” Hillary was now using her hands as flippers to flip Rudy Giuliani’s penis up and down like a pinball before he finally managed to pull himself away.

Hillary rolled her eyes. “God, everyone is so sensitive. Grow up. What did I do? I was just playing around. I was putting my paws on your pee-pee. I was digging for peen!” She said, laughing. Then, surprising all of the men around her, she did an incredibly realistic imitation of a French truffle pig digging for a man’s penis. “I love dick! I gots to have it! I gots to have that vitamin D!” the president called out, getting herself more and more worked up. Now, for some reason, she had slipped into a terrible Sean Connery voice: “Gimme that pen-ish. Gimme that pen-ish.” Everyone was horrified. Especially Marco Rubio, who had just come in wearing nothing but a Speedo and some Crocs. As she pulled Marco into a racially insensitive salsa dance, Ted Cruz tried to hide by stuffing his entire body into a locker. He knew if he didn’t hide fast, she would make him Macarena. “Ay ay ay, Papi! You’re a nine, Marco! You’re a nine!” Hillary called out, as she spun Marco Rubio around the room, snapping the waistline of his Speedo.

Paul Ryan didn’t know exactly why this was his breaking point — before this moment, he had never really had a breaking point — but he couldn’t stand it anymore. He had to do something, as a man, as a congressman, as an American. “No! No! Madam President!” Paul Ryan was shouting now. He was so angry. He was angrier than anyone from Wisconsin had ever been in the history of Wisconsin. He didn’t know where this anger was coming from. Maybe it was just her arrogance. Maybe it was her blindness. Maybe it was watching his friends get hurt. He stood up, still glistening with sweat from his super-hard ab workout, and said, “Madam President, you can’t just grab men. You have to ask first.”

“Ask? What am I going to do — stop everything and be like: ‘Can I grab your dick right now?’ What if you say no?” Hillary was now trying on Marco Rubio’s high-heeled boots to see if they fit her.

“They’re from Florsheim’s. They’re my favorite,” Marco said, quietly. “But you can have them, I guess.”

Paul Ryan was exasperated, which made him look even more like a midwestern cutie: “Madam President, I don’t know what to tell you — you’re breaking the law. And if that’s not enough for some unknown reason, maybe try to imagine that you’re related to us. Like, think of me as your brother or your father or your husband— ”

“Ew. Why the hell would I do that?” Hillary asked, confused. Her face twitched. A fly had landed on her cheek. The smell of sulfur filled the room. Something in her face was changing. A strange glow came out of her eyes, and Ben Carson got a chill up his spine like someone had just dropped an ice cube down his back, but the ice cube was evil.

“Wait, are you, like, literally a demon like Alex Jones said?” Paul Ryan asked, mystified. Hillary shrugged and said, “Yeah. Kind of. I’m 30 percent demon. I’m like business in the front, demon in the back?” She showed them the small pocket in the back of the pants where she hid a compact green demon tail. “It’s not that big a deal. It just means that I don’t really know how to talk to people, and I just sort of live in my tower and watch cable news.” It was true. The president had recently built a tower on the front lawn of the White House and put “Clinton” on it in large gold letters. Paul Ryan stared at Hillary. If she was a demon, maybe some of this made sense. It must be hard for her to be in the world and not understand how humans could actually be capable of great love. He found himself feeling just a tiny bit sorry for her. But only a little.

Paul Ryan squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and told her, “I don’t care if you’re a demon. I don’t care if you’re the president. I don’t care who you are. You have to take your soup and your cookie and your panini and get out of here, Madam President.”

One by one, each of the men in the locker room stood up. Hillary nodded, slowly. Even her demon brain was starting to understand. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll leave. But before I go, would anyone consent to me cupping their butt cheeks on my way out?” Each man said no. Hillary was about to give up hope when she heard a small voice coming from the back of the room.

It was Kenneth Bone. He had just finished his gymnastics class and was still wearing his leotard. His voice was gentle as he told Hillary, “I’m not okay with you cupping my butt, but I’d be okay with you holding my hand.”

Ben Carson shook his head and leaned over to Paul Ryan. “I don’t understand anything anymore,” he said. “Honestly, I feel like I’m losing it.” Paul Ryan nodded, and the two men watched as Kenneth Bone walked over to Hillary and held out his hand. Her face twitched more violently now. What was this? Consensual love? But what if she wasn’t enough for him? What if he eventually left and broke her heart? “I know it’s new for you, but don’t be scared,” Kenneth Bone said, softly. Her hand shook as she took Kenneth’s hand into hers, and together they walked out of the locker room. Her demon tail — for the first time in her life — was wagging.

Nor does it end there; like all good parables, the story has layer upon layer of forensic meaning. Drill down deeper and you find the senator who faced the same bankruptcy bill again in 2005. This time, it contained no provisions protecting single parents, but Wall Street was pushing to get it passed. A tough call—a vote either way would reveal Clinton’s true partiality. So the liberal sniper went awol: Bill was in the hospital that week and, for the few minutes of the bankruptcy vote, she simply had to be at his side. She missed the vote but, in a prepared statement, she threw some serious shade at the bill. This is Hillary the cutthroat opportunist, the Janus-faced harpy, the sly Antoinette who wants to have her cake and let them eat it, too.

Take a core sample from almost any story about Hillary Clinton in the massive armamentarium where they are stored and—like one of those Simpsons subterranean pan shots, revealing layers of absurd archaeology—all the Hillarys we have come to know will appear: the A student, the opportunist, the mastermind, the rat fink, the pragmatist, the truth-twister. Normally, in a paragraph of this sort, this is where you’d expect the word “Rorschach” to appear—the notion that all these competing Hillarys are simply different perspectives held by different people with different political views. But Clinton is long past such things. She’s a late-stage celebrity: Every version of her is a settled assumption, in the way that, say, Michael Jackson was, all at once, a musical genius, a bleached Diana Ross manqué, a pedophile, a brilliant choreographer, and a mediocre zookeeper.

From the beginning of the primary season, there has been one statistic that has stood out: The number of people who already hold a firm view of Hillary Clinton, positive or negative, adds up to 97 percent. Think about that: It explains why you’ve never seen a news story about her consultants fretting over “how to define our candidate before the opposition does.” Hillary began her campaign needing no introduction to anyone. She comes pre-hated and pre-admired. To Democrats, she already feels like a lame duck; to Republicans, an impeachment scheduling problem. If Clinton wins in November, she will be sworn into office on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol with all the mystery of Franklin Roosevelt coughing out his fourth oath in 1945.

By electing Clinton, America will get all our Hillarys, and no surprises. Her enemies know what they’re up against, her allies appreciate her many strengths, the press has been pre-schooled in her hunker-down style of squeezing out petulant clarifications, and her progressive critics formed their suspicions several presidents ago. For this electoral moment, though, Clinton may be precisely the president we need, flaws and all. Donald Trump’s pursuit of the White House has ground up our political landscape like a hurricane in a Florida trailer park. Trump hasn’t just caused a deep and possibly irreparable fissure in the Republican Party. He’s also short-circuited the mainstream press, recalibrated conservative media, and further splintered our delicately binary Congress. The America that lies on the other side of this election will bear little resemblance to the world before Trump. In fact, the only vaguely familiar thing in the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day may well be Hillary Clinton herself.

Given a presidential candidate who contains Whitmanesque multitudes and a nation that is exhausted with each and every one of them, there are aspects of a Clinton presidency we can already predict. First the good news: Hillary will arrive in Washington with several thousand Clintonian bureaucrats in her wake. That means there will be no growing pains of a new administration wrangling with the permanent government entrenched in Foggy Bottom and K Street. Which is essential, because she will get no honeymoon period, and any claim to a mandate will be instantly dismissed. Her admirers say she loves the treadmill of hard work? Great. The drudgery begins on day one.

Now the bad news: Hillary will arrive in Washington with several thousand Clintonian bureaucrats in her wake. That means we’ll immediately return to status Obama ante—nonstop convulsions of real and imagined scandals that will dominate Washington for at least the next four years. Americans will be forced to reacquaint themselves with an almost forgotten quotidian grind—independent prosecutors, special reports, the nuances of perjury, and panels of Sunday-morning gasbags intoning that it’s never the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.

Few politicians have been so vilified by their enemies, and for so long, as Clinton. Her strengths and failings have been unrecognizably obscured by the hyperventilated dust storm that stretches from Susan Sarandon’s sun-drenched pool to David Duke’s midnight klavern. Those who detest Clinton have so overstated her failings that they are unable to see her as anything other than a kind of colossus that moves in a staticky cloud of ever-present suspicion. Boiled down, though, the main charges against Hillary are twofold: She’s an Olympic-level liar (the email server), and she’s corrupt on a global scale (the Clinton Foundation).

There’s no question that Hillary instinctively goes for the slippery near-truth when she finds herself boxed in politically, and that she mixes money and politics in ways that blur the line. But it’s important to understand just what Clinton’s real failings are—because these faults, in a paradoxical way, appear to be perfectly calibrated to benefit her in the post-Trump political environment, as though she were some cave-dwelling chameleon that has adapted over the millennia to breathe hydrogen cyanide. To understand what a third Clinton administration would look like, let’s take the charges against Hillary one at a time.

As a charity, the Clinton Foundation receives reasonably high marks from those who monitor the philanthropic set. Its fund-raising, on the other hand, is a bit tacky—built on back-to-back round-robins of gaudy VIPs congratulating each other while handing over checks, a networking scheme modeled on those old Renaissance Weekends where superambitious people gathered for bad food and career enhancement. Sure, some sultan has donated multimillions to fly in as a special guest to hobnob with the unwashed throngs of thousandaire donors. But the harshest investigation of this Rolodex-plumping operation, conducted by the Associated Press, revealed nothing extraordinary. The AP strained mightily to find any evidence of pay-for-play, but ended up having to settle for lots of paragraphs governed by words like “appear” and “perception.”

The Clintons are way too slick to get busted for that, anyway—as Hillary’s enemies would normally be the first to remind us. The Clinton Foundation has always dwelled right at the cusp of legality, just to this side of Michael Kinsley’s famous Washington law—“The scandal is not what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.” The Clinton Foundation is no different than George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light Foundation (founded and earning donations while he was the sitting president) or Colin Powell’s America’s Promise (run by his wife, Alma, while he was secretary of state). That politicians take money from people seeking favors in return is not news. It’s business as usual in Washington. Just ask former House Speaker John Boehner, who once handed out campaign checks from the tobacco industry to House members on the floor of Congress precisely as they prepared to vote to preserve the industry’s $49 million taxpayer subsidy.

So why all the right-wing outrage about the Clinton Foundation? It comes down to a subtlety that can only be explained by someone who, like myself, comes from old-old money. I grew up among the fallen gentry of Charleston, South Carolina, where our money is so old we don’t have any. Bush is merely from old money, as is Powell (though only by proximity). The Clintons’ real crime is that they are tasteless parvenus who started with almost nothing (there are those who can never forget Bill’s mom, Virginia Kelley, the racetrack denizen with that white streak in her hair and one of her four husbands on her arm). To raise funds, old-money foundations need only come into existence to quietly open the comely wallets of the country-estate set. But new money—and this is the Clintons’ real sin—has to ask.

The other reason Clinton’s grubby foundation has been amped up into a Teapot Dome/Crédit Mobilier level of scandal is because of a cognitive flaw in the Trump voter that I discovered at a dinner party a few nights ago. After a pleasant meal, the topic of the election inevitably came up. Suddenly, a Yale professional at the table outed himself as a Trump voter. His rant turned exclusively on the “obvious” fact that Hillary is the most corrupt politician in history and will exit the presidency a billionaire while bringing the American Republic to an end. He didn’t care about Boehner dealing out cashier’s checks like playing cards during a House vote, or Trump paying off the attorneys general of Texas and Florida to drop fraud prosecutions over his big-store con known as Trump University. To the Trump voter, such specific examples of pay-for-play pale in comparison to Hillary’s vague air of corruption.

After this quarrel, I realized two things about the way many Trump supporters conceive of Clinton. First, the charges against Hillary are a classic case of blaming your opponent for your own sins. All the flying squads of Ken Starr, Trey Gowdy, and James Comey have gone right at Clinton with full subpoena power and years of time. Yet they all came up empty. Trump, on the other hand, has very specifically engaged in bribery, and we know this because he has told us all, on national television, so many times. It was one of his early riffs in the debates. He would single out Jeb Bush and other opponents and explain to the audience that he had donated lots of money to them over the years, and had expected full political corruption in return. “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” he cawed in an interview, after which the peristalsis of his mouth-like opening relaxed into a flaccid smirk.

Second, Trump’s critique of Hillary as the master of corruption can be made about any politician running for office today. Attacking her for what everyone does is the oldest political charade in the books. But if her opponents are serious about their outrage over Crooked Hillary, then this could be the first advantage of electing her president. The day after she’s inaugurated, let the new Congress crack down on campaign financing, tighten ethical standards for elected officials, and ban blatant scams like pay-for-play. If we outlaw all the things Hillary’s enemies hate in her, we’ll be doing away with everything the rest of the country hates about the entire political class. So sure, ruin Michael Kinsley’s joke. Bring it.

The other charge routinely leveled against Hillary is that she’s a “congenital liar,” as William Safire dubbed her decades ago. If she’s elected in November, we’ll be hearing this assertion for the next four years, so it’s best to understand just what we’re in for.

Hillary lies the way her husband lies, which is to say she does not lie. What she does do is even more irritating. My Trump-supporting dinner guest screamed at me that no one lies as brazenly as Hillary Clinton. But take any of her lies, sit down with the facts, and—well, as James Comey found, it’s like trying to pith mercury. Clinton said, for instance, that Comey testified that she had told the truth in her statements about the email controversy. Well, not precisely. What he said was, “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” Clinton’s parsing was weaselly, but not a lie.

The Big Lie, as practiced by Richard Nixon—when he insisted he “scrupulously respected the neutrality of the Cambodian people” while bombing Cambodia—is a lie so huge that, usually, everyone falls for it because of the sheer audacity of the claim. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was the first to perfect what should be called the Tiny Truth. In his infamous deposition, he managed to get “sex” defined as intercourse, and then said that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky, which as we all know is true in the smallest possible sense of anything being true.

For Nixon, the Big Lie served as an occasional dodge; for Trump, it’s his native tongue. Trump said that he saw a video of American Arabs partying the afternoon of September 11, but he made that up. Trump said he saw a video of pallets of money being handed to Iran as ransom, but he made that up. Trump said he opposed the Iraq War before it started, but he made that up. Trump said he spoke to a Chicago cop with a surefire solution to crime, but he made that up. Trump said he received a letter from the NFL about debate scheduling, but he made that up. Big Lies fall from Trump’s lips with the frantic improvisation of a crook under an interrogation lamp.

The sheer magnitude of Trump’s horseshit, in fact, has prompted an unexpected reconfiguration of America’s media—one that will benefit Hillary tremendously, should she be elected in November. Thanks to Trump, some television hosts have discovered the ratings pull of a different style of journalism. Jake Tapper of CNN grilled Trump about his bigotry regarding the all-American judge of Mexican descent so skillfully and persistently that Trump wound up making several more mistakes, and now avoids the subject entirely. The interview was such a departure from standard TV interview fare—which strives to be “fair” in the face of nonstop falsehoods—that On the Media devoted an entire segment to deconstructing Tapper’s technique.

Other journalists have followed suit. When Trump lawyer Michael Cohen challenged Brianna Keilar of CNN to name which polls showed Trump behind, she hit him with the truth. “All of them,” she said. When The New York Times ran a story about Trump “softening” his immigration stance after one of his bloodcurdling nativist dog whistles, the rest of the media vilified the paper. When Matt Lauer beat Hillary with a two-by-four before letting Trump spout one unchallenged lie after another, other journalists suggested he be reassigned to the weather desk. CNN has even taken to running onscreen disclaimers: “Trump: I never said Japan should have nukes (he did),” and “Trump calls Obama Founder of isis (he’s not).”

A split has also appeared among conservative media, but it’s existentially different. Since Fox News and its ilk never struggled with the mealy ideal of objectivity, their chief concern was how to mix smart conservative critiques (think Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly) with the fun of totally made-up crises (birtherism, the existence of Muslim-only cities) and errant stupidity (the war on Christmas, anything on Fox & Friends). But just as Roger Ailes has moved from Fox’s second floor directly into Trump Tower, the craziest faction of Fox’s aging and angry demographic has broken away. Alt-reality, in fact, is now a fully defined ratings demo of its own. Its primary outlets are Breitbart and Newsmax, The Blaze,and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Trump has managed something that liberal Democrats have attempted for years—to isolate the alt-reality wing from reality-based business leaders, national security neocons, and economic conservatives. George Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, noted hawk Robert Kagan, and Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman are all voting for Hillary.

By deeply fragmenting the media ecosystem, Trump has done Clinton an enormous favor. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” that hounded Bill and Hillary from the moment they stepped foot in Washington originally had a name—the Arkansas Project—and was funded by the Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Scaife. They perfected a method of following rumors, mostly by fluffing far-out stories such as the Clintons murdering Vincent Foster or running a drug operation out of Little Rock. Since then, the methodology has matured into a carefully crafted propaganda machine that concocts stories and field tests them in outlying web sites and loony YouTube channels, essentially trying them out to see which ones would migrate up through Fox News and go viral enough to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. But now that Trump has split off the alt-reality crowd and claimed them for his own, they aren’t even taken seriously by the more “serious” right-wingers at Fox News, let alone The New York Times. The recent accusation that Clinton was using a body double to hide her health problems, for example, sluiced up from Reddit for a day, only to wash out to the remote crannies of the Twittersphere where Scott Baio is a star.

After the election, this fact-free sensibility will find itself even further segregated, possibly with its very own cable TV alt-reality outlet. There, climate deniers and listening-device fetishists can trade proofs of Bill Clinton’s bastards, weigh Julian Assange’s evidence that Clinton murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, or solve columnist Jennifer LeClaire’s dilemma of deciding whether Hillary is the “Antichrist” or an “Illuminati Witch”—all while watching commercials for Jim Bakker’s End Times “Emergency Food Supply”: 274 servings on sale for a limited-time offer of only $100.

When her opposition is split like this, Clinton’s talent for working with her enemies serves her best. Thanks to the schism created by Trump, she won’t have to worry about a post-election rapprochement among the opposing factions. If the alt-reality crowd despises Nancy Pelosi without even thinking, they hate Paul Ryan with the heat of a thousand suns. The Capitol is rife with rumors of a post-election coup to force out Ryan as speaker. The far right fumes about mainstream Republican leaders being too accommodationist and believes that more incoherence is the answer. In all likelihood, the election will only widen this fissure. If Trump loses such that the down ticket suffers, alt-reality congressmen are the most likely to survive, given their gerrymandered districts, while Ryan’s reality-based comrades are more likely to get tossed out. When it comes to the congressional landscape, losing will only make Trump and his allies stronger.

On the Democratic side, the progressive wing of the party will also emerge from the election considerably stronger. Elizabeth Warren is already gearing up to hold Clinton to her Bernie-soothing promises. Politico reports that Clinton has agreed not to appoint cronies like Robert Rubin or others who are “beholden to the industries they regulate.” In short, the post-Trump universe now is split into so many factions on both the right and the left that every victory in Congress will require stitching together a crazy-quilt of alliances. If Ryan wants to pass legislation he can claim as his own, he’ll have to cut deals with the Democrats. If progressives want to enact meaningful reforms or centrist Democrats want to maintain the status quo, they’ll need to forge alliances with foes as well as friends.

This is where Hillary’s key flaw—her lack of commitment to any specific position—will work to her benefit, as well as ours. Every issue will be a multisided fight—and who better to navigate such terrain than the chameleon in chief? Clinton is savvy enough to get votes by quietly inviting her enemies in Congress on both sides to vilify her and explain to their voters that they had no choice but to support some bill because the evil madam president made this the only way to pass a much-needed defense spending bill, etc.

Clinton has a quarter-century of experience bathing in the vitriol of her foes; only in moments of weakness has she ever treated them the way they have treated her. She is unafraid of even her most contemptuous enemies. When she ran for the Senate in 2000, she was widely expected to lose, because she couldn’t win the support of rural voters and tough, angry men left behind in Rust Belt cities like Buffalo. But Clinton went to Buffalo to do that thing her enemies despise: a listening tour. She visited Buffalo 26 times, and when the votes were tallied, she took Buffalo and won a Senate seat.

After Trump, every issue will be a multisided fight—and who better to navigate such a terrain than the chameleon in chief?

Unlike Obama, Clinton does not expect dignified senators to simply come to her view. She will pick up the phone in the middle of the night, the way LBJ did, and have members of the House and Senate bolting from bed to the sound of an operator saying, “Please hold for the president of the United States.” Hillary will threaten her own side, sweet-talk her enemies, issue infuriating and slippery statements, and betray whomever it takes—all to get enough votes to add up to 51 percent.

Hillary getting to a new job always seems to be an occasion accompanied by portents of catastrophe. But once she’s hired, she happily deploys any and all of her multiple personalities to achieve something that looks a lot like democratic political bargaining. With Clinton, what begins in scorn ends in support: When she was finished as first lady, she had an approval rating of 60 percent; as a departing senator, 66 percent; as departing secretary of state, 65 percent.

The political landscape that lies before us next year will require a president who has the capacity to be a cutthroat negotiator, a quiet friend, a forgiving enemy, a turncoat, and a detail-obsessed wonk. If the country elects such a person, there is a distinct possibility that American democracy will discover that inch-by-inch progress on legislation happens after vigorous wrangling, which eventually gets to a deeply unsatisfying resolution that leaves almost everybody in a grumpy mood, and sort of works, but not all that well and yet well enough to get us to the next fight—which, if you will recall, is exactly what the Founding Fathers sketched out on paper in 1787. And here’s the thing: If it unfolds that way, under President Hillary Clinton, then historians will be able to honestly say that Donald Trump lived up to his promise, however accidentally, and made America great again.