Hillary Clinton Is The Eileen Gu Of Politics

World leaders gathered in Munich over the weekend to discuss the major security issues of the day. Because the gathering brought together world leaders, Hillary Clinton was there. Because the leaders were gathered to discuss the topic of global security, she led a panel discussion on women’s rights that featured a transgendered American dude in a dress.

On its face, none of that makes any sense at all. Hillary isn’t a leader of anything, or a success at anything. She lost her bid for the presidency, after being handed a couple of public offices that she treated as vanity fiefdoms, and spends her dotage flying around and complaining. And the ludicrous gender discussion was unusually pathetic, even by the normal standards.

But Hillary wasn’t there to be Hillary. She was there to be Not Trump. As Matt Taibbi said, “She’s President of the Government-in-Exile.” She’s there to allow the world to pretend that the status quo is unbroken, America is still firmly ruled by a self-referential and mediocre caste of technocrats, and the Great Orange Hallucination is just a bad dream that will go away as soon as the world wakes up. She’s a barrier in a pantsuit, a fantasy curtain. Europeans look at her and see the true American leadership, which they yearn to restore.

The degree to which Europe wishes to pretend the Trump years away was made clear over and over again. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski (who is married to the queen of tedious American midwits) complained that J.D. Vance had used his speech at the same gathering last year to rebuke Europeans for their efforts to restrict freedom of speech. In fact, Sikorski said, Europe just has a different conception of freedom, and the Trump administration is being very mean about not honoring their more restrictive societal rules. “And what happened here a year ago was that the vice-president of the United States was telling us that our notion of free speech was censorship. And I just don’t accept that.”

That was the moral and intellectual flavor of the discussion in Munich: “I just don’t accept that.” This sentence is the reason Hillary was there. She was the vessel into which Europeans could pour their refusal to accept American political change. Watch this exchange, in which a former American secretary of state trashes the American president in front of a foreign audience:

The crowd’s reaction is quite interesting, there at the end, as an audience of European officials jeers and mutters at another European official who argues that woke culture has gone too far. Hillary is there as a figurehead of the technocratic social engineering they don’t wish to give up, and so some mild and deferential criticism from Czech Deputy Prime Minister Petr Macinka runs into the buzzsaw of European wishcasting. He disagrees with their spiritual totem, which represents their desire to live in 2020 forever, throwing people off of social media for any act of dissent that can be falsely characterized as extremism or disinformation. They have their own notion of freedom, and Trump doesn’t share it. “And I just don’t accept that.”

Hillary was on a series of stages in Munich, front and center in a series of discussions, to give Europe a way to not accept political change. It was a shameful role for her to play, playing in opposition to her own country, but she was happy to do it. It gave her a place to playact at being the leader she has never actually been, and will never become. She played for the other team, which allowed her to pretend to be important. She appeared to enjoy it.

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.