Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray, Deputy Editor of The Spectator. Today we're going to be talking to John Rick MacArthur, who is publisher of Harper's magazine, and we're going to be discussing the Democrats and the return of Hillary Clinton.

So, Rick, in the aftermath of Trump's election, I think most people thought Clinton must be finished.

I mean, she just lost an election to a man who had very, very high disapproval ratings,

and her candidacy was obviously a disaster.

And yet it seems she's not, and the Clintons you might even say, are still in charge of the Democrat Party.

Is that a fair thing to say?

Yes, because I also thought she was, you know, the silver lining in the Trump nightmare was that the Clintons

were finished politically.

It last, long last, they would be discredited simply as political candidates and that she'd

go away and open up the party to other fresh talent.

And I said this to a friend of mine who knows politics from the inside.

His uncle was Senator Patrick Moynihan.

He says to me, who says the Clintons are finished?

She won the popular vote.

She's going around trumpeting that she won the popular vote.

They still raise most of the money for the party.

She's not that much older than Trump, and she's probably in physically better shape.

What makes you think they're finished?

And what makes you think they won't continue to try to run the party from

from the wings, at least in the short term. Yeah. She gave a big speech on St. Patrick's Day

last week, I think talking about sort of healing the nation, and she's supposed to give a lot more

...