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On the platform, we sat next to the Bushes. The four of us had caught up inside a few minutes earlier, trading updates about our daughters and grandchildren. We chatted like it was any other day. George and Laura gave us the latest news about the health of George’s parents, former President George H. W. and Barbara, both of whom had been in the hospital recently but, happily, were now on the mend.

As we sat waiting for the President Elect to arrive, my mind wandered back to that incredible day twenty-four years earlier when Bill took the oath of office for the first time. It could not have been easy for George H. W. and Barbara to watch, but they had been extraordinarily gracious to us. The outgoing President left a letter for Bill in the Oval Office that is one of the most decent and patriotic things I’ve ever read. “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you,” he wrote. We did our best to show the same graciousness to George W. and Laura eight years later. At this moment, I was trying to summon a similar attitude about the incoming President. As I had said in my concession speech, he deserved an open mind and the chance to lead.

I also thought about Al Gore, who in 2001 sat stoically through George W.’s inauguration despite having won more votes. Five members of the Supreme Court decided that election. That must have been awful to bear. I realized I was inventing a new pastime: imagining the pain of past electoral losses. John Adams, our second Commander in Chief, suffered the indignity of being the first President ever voted out of office, losing to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, but he got a measure of revenge twenty-five years later when his son John Quincy was elected. In 1972, George McGovern lost forty-nine out of fifty states to Richard Nixon—Bill and I worked hard on McGovern’s campaign and have indelible memories of that defeat. And let’s not forget William Howard Taft, whom Teddy Roosevelt had groomed to succeed him. Four years later, in 1912, Teddy decided Taft wasn’t doing a good enough job as President, so he ran as a third-party candidate, split the electorate, and Woodrow Wilson won. That had to hurt.

Then Bill touched my elbow, and I snapped back to the present.

The Obamas and the Bidens were in front of us. I imagined President Obama riding over in the presidential limo with a man who had risen to prominence partly by lying about Barack’s birthplace and accusing him of not being an American. At some point in the day’s proceedings, Michelle and I shared a rueful look. It said, “Can you believe this?” Eight years before, on the bitterly cold day when Barack was sworn in, our heads were full of plans and possibilities. Today was just about putting on a game face and getting through it.

The President Elect finally arrived. I had known Donald Trump for years, but never imagined he’d be standing on the steps of the Capitol taking the oath of office as President of the United States. He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a Senator—like a lot of big-shot real estate guys in the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting. In 2005, he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assumed he wanted as much star power as he could get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right. I attended the ceremony, then met Bill for the reception at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. We had our photo taken with the bride and groom and left.

The next year, Trump joined other prominent New Yorkers in a video spoof prepared for the Legislative Correspondents Association dinner in Albany, which is the state version of the more famous White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The idea was that the wax figure of me at the Madame Tussauds museum in Times Square had been stolen, so I had to stand in and pretend to be a statue while various famous people walked by and said things to me. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said I was doing a great job as Senator—then joked about running for President in 2008 as a self-funder. When Trump appeared, he said, “You look really great. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. The hair is magnificent. The face is beautiful. You know, I really think you’d make a great President. Nobody could come close.” The camera pulled back to reveal he wasn’t talking to me after all but to his own wax statue. It was funny at the time.

When Trump declared his candidacy for real in 2015, I thought it was another joke, like a lot of people did. By then, he’d remade himself from tabloid scoundrel into right-wing crank, with his long, offensive, quixotic obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate. He’d flirted with politics for decades, but it was hard to take him seriously. He reminded me of one of those old men ranting on about how the country was going to hell in a handbasket unless people started listening to him.

It was impossible to ignore Trump—the media gave him free wall-to-wall coverage. I thought it was important to call him out for his bigotry, which I did early and often, starting when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers the day he announced his candidacy. But it wasn’t until I saw him dominate a debate with a crowded field of talented Republican candidates—not with brilliant ideas or powerful arguments but with ugly attacks that drew gasps—that I realized he might be for real.

Now here he was, with his hand on the Bible, promising to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. The joke, it turned out, was on us.

It started to rain, and people around us fumbled with the thin plastic ponchos we’d been given. Backstage, I had urged Bill to wear his trench coat. The day was unusually warm, and Bill didn’t think he needed it. Now he was glad he’d worn it—a small wifely victory on a torturous day. As awkward as the ponchos looked, they could have looked worse. I had heard that the first batch of white ponchos that arrived could have looked something like KKK hoods from a certain angle, and a sharp-eyed inaugural organizer quickly replaced them.

The new President’s speech was dark and dystopian. I heard it as a howl straight from the white nationalist gut. Its most memorable line was about “American carnage,” a startling phrase more suited to a slasher film than an inaugural address. Trump painted a picture of a bitter, broken country I didn’t recognize.

I knew we still had real challenges, ones I had talked about endlessly on the campaign trail: income inequality and the increasing concentration of corporate power, continuing threats from terrorism and climate change, the rising cost of health care, the need to create more and better jobs in the face of accelerating automation. The American middle class really had gotten screwed. The financial crash of 2008–2009 cost them jobs and ripped away their security. It seemed like no one was ever held accountable. Americans across a broad spectrum felt alienated, from culturally traditional white voters unsettled by the pace of social change, to black men and women who felt as if the country didn’t value their lives, to Dreamers and patriotic Muslim citizens who were made to feel like intruders in their own land.

Trump was great at rubbing salt in their wounds. But he was wrong about so much. There had been seventy-five straight months of job growth under President Obama, and incomes for the bottom 80 percent were finally starting to go up. Twenty million more people had health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the greatest legislative achievement of the outgoing administration. Crime was still at historic lows. Our military remained by far the most powerful in the world. These are knowable, verifiable facts. Trump stood up there in front of the world and said the exact opposite—just as he had throughout the campaign. He didn’t seem to see or value any of the energy and optimism I saw when I traveled around the country.

Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way.

My predecessor in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” We can disagree about policies and values, but claiming that 2 + 2 = 5 and having millions of Americans swallow it is very different. When the most powerful person in our country says, “Don’t believe your eyes, don’t believe the experts, don’t believe the numbers, just believe me,” that rips a big hole in a free democratic society like ours. As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”

Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves. For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s about simple dominance.

This trend didn’t start with Trump. Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason in 2007. In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness,” inspired by how Fox News was turning politics into an evidence-free zone of seething resentments. And the Republican politicians whom Fox propelled to power had done their part, too. Republican strategist Karl Rove famously dismissed critics who lived in “the reality-based community”—words intended as a slight—saying they failed to grasp that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

But Trump has taken the war on truth to a whole new level. If he stood up tomorrow and declared that the Earth is flat, his counselor Kellyanne Conway just might go on Fox News and defend it as an “alternative fact,” and too many people would believe it. Just look at what happened several weeks into his presidency when Trump falsely accused President Obama of having wiretapped him, a claim that was widely and quickly debunked. A subsequent poll found that 74 percent of Republicans nevertheless thought it was at least somewhat likely to be true.

Trump’s inaugural address was aimed squarely at millions of Americans who felt insecure and frustrated, even hopeless, in a changing economy and society. A lot of people were looking for someone to blame. Too many saw the world in zero-sum terms, believing that gains made by fellow Americans they viewed as “other”—people of color, immigrants, women, LGBT people, Muslims—were not earned and must be coming at someone’s expense. The economic pain and dislocation were real, and so was the psychic pain. It made for a toxic, combustible mix.

I hadn’t been blind to the power of this anger. During the campaign, Bill and I both went back and reread The True Believer, Eric Hoffer’s 1951 exploration of the psychology behind fanaticism and mass movements, and I shared it with my senior staff. On the campaign trail, I offered ideas that I believed would address many of the underlying causes of discontent and help make life better for all Americans. But I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous. It helps leaders who want to take advantage of that rage to hurt people rather than help them. Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.

Maybe that’s why Trump was now delivering the inaugural address and I was sitting in the crowd.

What would I have said if it were me up there? It would have been daunting to find the words to match the moment. I probably would have gone through a million drafts. My poor speechwriters would have been sprinting only steps ahead of me carrying the thumb drive with the final draft to the teleprompter operator. But I would have relished the chance to move beyond the rancor of the campaign, reach out to all Americans regardless of who they voted for, and offer a vision of national reconciliation, shared opportunity, and inclusive prosperity. It would have been an extraordinary honor to be the first woman to take the oath. I won’t pretend I hadn’t dreamt of that moment—for me, for my mother, for my daughter, her daughter, everyone’s daughters—and for our sons.

Instead, the world was listening to the new President’s undimmed fury. I remembered the late Maya Angelou reading one of her poems at Bill’s first inauguration. “Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness,” she urged us. What would she say if she could hear this speech?

Then it was done, and he was our President.

“That was some weird shit,” George W. reportedly said with characteristic Texas bluntness. I couldn’t have agreed more.

We headed up the stairs to leave the platform and go back inside the Capitol, shaking hands along the way. I saw a man off to the side who I thought was Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee and incoming White House Chief of Staff. As I passed by, we shook hands and exchanged small talk. Later I realized it hadn’t been Priebus at all. It was Jason Chaffetz, the then–Utah Congressman and wannabe Javert who made endless political hay out of my emails and the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. Later, Chaffetz posted a picture of our handshake with the caption “So pleased she is not the President. I thanked her for her service and wished her luck. The investigation continues.” What a class act! I came this close to tweeting back, “To be honest, thought you were Reince.”

The rest of the day was a blur of greeting old friends and trying to avoid eye contact with those people who’d said terrible things about me during the campaign.

I ran into Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, walking slowly but with steely determination. If I had won, she might have enjoyed a nice retirement. Now I hoped she’d stay on the bench as long as humanly possible.

At lunch in the Capitol, I sat at our assigned table and commiserated with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, who I think is one of the shrewdest, most effective politicians in Washington. She deserves enormous credit for marshalling the votes for the 2010 Affordable Care Act under nearly impossible circumstances and for standing up for what’s right whether she’s in the majority or the minority. Republicans have demonized her for years because they know she gets things done.

Senator John McCain of Arizona came over and gave me a hug. He seemed nearly as distraught as I was.

The niece of a top official in the incoming Trump administration came over to introduce herself and whisper in my ear that she had voted for me but was keeping it a secret.

Congressman Ryan Zinke, soon to be Trump’s Interior Secretary, brought his wife over to say hello. This was somewhat surprising, considering that in 2014 he had called me the “Antichrist.” Maybe he’d forgotten, because he didn’t come equipped with any garlic or wooden stakes, or whatever one uses to ward off the Antichrist. But I hadn’t forgotten. “You know, Congressman,” I said, “I’m not actually the Antichrist.” He was taken aback and mumbled something about not having meant it. One thing I’ve learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I’m not around, but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.

I talked with Tiffany Trump about her plans to attend law school. I kidded with Republican Senator John Cornyn about how I performed much better than expected in his state of Texas. In the President’s remarks at lunch, when he was away from the glare of his angry supporters, Trump thanked Bill and me for coming. Then, finally, we could leave.

Little did I know that the first controversy of the new administration had already begun over the size of the crowd at the inauguration. As is its practice, the U.S. National Park Service quickly published photos to mark the occasion. This time the new President disputed the photographic evidence showing only a modest crowd and demanded that the Park Service go with the lie that the crowds were “huge.” This flew in the face of what we could all see with our own eyes. I had the same view Trump did up there on the platform. Unlike him, I could compare it to what I had seen at inaugurals since 1993. I understood why he became so defensive. There really was a difference.

The episode was silly, but also an early warning: we were in a “brave new world.”