If Hillary Clinton Had Won: The New Yorker Cover

Image may contain Human Person Advertisement and Poster

Over the past ten months, many Americans, regardless of how they voted, have contemplated what life would have looked like if Hillary Clinton had been elected President on November 8, 2016. In at least one respect, we can now share a definitive answer. Above is the cover “The First,” by Malika Favre, that The New Yorker would have published had Clinton defeated Donald Trump to become the first female Commander-in-Chief.

In next week’s issue, David Remnick speaks with Clinton about her new memoir, the campaign, her stinging loss, and its aftermath; their conversation touched on the former F.B.I. director James Comey, accusations of Russian interference, and the role of sexism in Trump’s victory. “Clinton’s memoir radiates with fury at the forces and the figures ranged against her,” Remnick writes, “but it is also salted with self-searching, grief, bitterness, and fitful attempts to channel and contain that fury.” Clinton told him, “Literally, at times when I was writing it, I had to go lie down . . . I just couldn’t bear to relive it.”

Instead of Favre’s moonlit image of Clinton, the following week’s magazine cover was Bob Staake’s “The Wall.” As the magazine’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, wrote at the time, “When we first received the results of the election, we felt as though we had hit a brick wall, full force.” Perhaps no one shared that feeling as viscerally as the vanquished candidate. “In conversation and in the book,” Remnick writes, “Clinton’s pain is manifest.”