Hundreds of Hillary Clinton supporters lined up Tuesday outside the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in New York City to buy a copy of Clinton’s new book, “What Happened,” and to have it signed by the author.

But their remembrances of the 2016 campaign didn’t always wash with news reports, and their views of the candidate as a disadvantaged underdog seem to be at odds with the facts of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Close

[lz_ndn video=32968064]

One supporter waiting in line, Claudia Cavaliere, a 27-year-old woman from Salerno, Italy, told the New York Daily News that she thought Clinton handled the loss to Donald Trump “with strength and grace.”

Clinton did give a gracious concession speech on November 9, the day after the election, at The New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan, with her husband Bill Clinton behind her, saying she’d called and congratulated Trump and that she hopes he will be “a successful president for all Americans.”

But the night before, she didn’t appear at her own election night party at the Javits Center — New York City’s convention center — to thank her supporters, and The American Spectator reported on November 14 that a Secret Service agent had said she’d flown into a rage when learning that she’d lost the election to Trump, throwing things and swearing, and that this was the reason she had not come out to address her supporters.

The absence of the candidate at her own election-night party left the media to pan the crowd of weeping Clinton supporters, many of them young women, who’d waited for hours for their candidate to appear. Instead, just after 2 a.m., campaign chairman John Podesta appeared at the podium and said, “They’re still counting votes, and every vote should count. Several states are too close to call, so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.”

But it was over, and everyone knew it. Trump had won Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. There wasn’t any way Clinton could win it. There was nothing for her to do but concede, and stand before her supporters and thank them for all of their hard work. But she didn’t do it.

Other supporters at the book signing were still not accepting that Clinton lost, and insisted that the election was stolen from her.

“I worked on the campaign, and she won it!” a children’s book author named Carol Snyder, age 76, told the Daily Mail. ” We want to let her know that so that she feels very successful. This was stolen from her.”

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

But WikiLeaks memos reveal that it was the Clinton campaign that was working hand in glove with the Democratic National Committee and the media to try to steal the Democratic primary from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with one DNC staffer discussing in a leaked email how they could hurt Sanders by getting a journalist to ask him a question about his faith — specifically, whether he considers himself Jewish or an atheist.

“We’re upset, we’re angry, we’re resentful that she’s not our president,” another woman said, indicating that Clinton supporters have not heeded the candidate’s own stern warning in the final debate that in a democracy, people must accept the outcome of an election.

“That’s not the way our democracy works,” Clinton said in response to Trump’s saying, “I will look at it at the time” when asked if he would honor the election results.

[lz_related_box id=840566]

Clinton later tweeted that Trump’s refusal to say he’d honor the results of the election amounted to “a direct threat to our democracy.”

Clinton was scheduled to arrive at the book signing at 11 a.m., but was more than an hour late. She walked into the store to the sound of the crowd chanting, “Hill-a-ry, Hill-a-ry.” She did not speak to the crowd awaiting her, but got right to work signing books on a stage.

“What Happened” went on sale nationwide on Tuesday. The book is published by Simon & Schuster, which also published Clinton’s 2004 book, “Living History,” her 2014 book “Hard Choices: A Memoir,” and the three iterations of “It Takes a Village,” the most recent one an illustrated children’s book, released on Tuesday at the same time as “What Happened.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Gage Skidmore, FLickr)