The 2024 election may be shaping up to be another showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton is seemingly trying to reinsert herself into the national conversation.
The former secretary of state announced that she has a new memoir coming out this fall that is being billed as “a warning to all American voters” ahead of Election Day and “Hillary like you haven’t seen her before.” To the latter point, the cover of the book, which features a photo of Clinton, had some – including Megyn – doing a double take.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Maureen Callahan, author of Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, to discuss the curious cover art and Clinton’s latest out-of-touch column in The New York Times.
Photoshop Fail?
The 2016 election is in the rearview mirror for most Americans, but Clinton is apparently still not over her stunning loss to Trump. Her new memoir – set to debut seven weeks before the election on September 17 – is titled Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty.
Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, says the book will offer Clinton’s “unvarnished views on politics, democracy, the threats we face, and the future within our reach” and “reads like you’re sitting down with your smartest, funniest, most passionate friend over a long meal.”
The memoir reportedly includes reflections on her marriage to former President Bill Clinton, her friendships, and, yes, how she handles losing. But it’s not just the topics or the timing of the book that is getting attention.
Megyn had a hard time getting past the cover, which features Clinton looking into the camera with a soft smile. “The amount of retouching on this face I haven’t seen since, you know, Joan Rivers had her fifteenth surgery. God love, Joan,” she noted. “I don’t know what she is trying to be with this soft focus.”
Callahan joked that the photo editor “deserves a huge raise” for making Clinton appear more approachable. “This is a much more soft, welcoming, [and] friendly Hillary, I suppose,” she said, adding that the former senator’s “self awareness” still appears to be lacking.
“‘Something lost’? I wonder what that was,” Callahan quipped. “The woman wrote a book called What Happened marveling over all the external forces that could have caused her loss in a presidential election that was handed to her on a silver platter.”
The Op-Ed
Clinton timed the announcement of the book to the publishing of an op-ed in the Times in which she pats herself on the back for having debated both Biden and Trump. In the piece titled “I’ve Debated Trump and Biden. Here’s What I’m Watching For,” she calls dealing with Trump a “waste of time” and accuses him of “outright lies.”
Callahan pointed out the irony of the paragraph in which Clinton goes on about all the hours she put in preparing to debate the GOP hopeful only to end the section with the declaration that “it worked.” If it “worked” as claimed, Callahan noted that Clinton would be president.
While Clinton pulled no punches when describing how “going head-to-head with the former president [Trump] is like juggling nonsense, blather, and bluster,” Megyn said she also failed to disclose an inconvenient truth. “What [Trump] did [in 2016] was he got out there and said you’d be in jail if he were in charge and people loved the challenge of power of somebody who’d been considered untouchable,” she explained.
“In the meantime, as we now know, she was cheating behind the scenes of these debates,” Megyn continued. “He was not cheating with the Russians or anyone else, and he was raising issues that really mattered to working class and middle America, who she totally ignored. None of that is in the op-ed.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Callahan by tuning in to episode 822 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.