Donald Trump is being feted in China as Hillary Clinton spends the grim anniversary of her loss on a book tour – in a state where she failed to campaign

Donald Trump had the red carpet rolled out for him on Thursday in Beijing, where he aspires to the role of global statesman weighing the fate of billions of people.

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Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is heading to downtown Milwaukee, promoting her book at an old vaudeville show house tucked between Mo’s Irish Pub, Planet Fitness, Potbelly, Subway and Uhle’s Finest Cigars and Tobacco.

Yes, elections have consequences. A year to the day after he was declared US president-elect and responded with an unusually gracious victory speech, Trump was being feted by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, with a military parade and flag-waving children at the Great Hall of the People. Currently on a 13-day tour of Asia, Trump urged China to “act faster” to combat the North Korean nuclear threat. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Clinton, currently on a 13-week tour of the US and Canada to promote her election memoir, will spend the grim anniversary on stage at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where organisers say nearly all 2,558 seats have sold, though on Wednesday some were still available at $55. The choice of actor Bradley Whitford as moderator seems particularly apt, not only because he played White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman in The West Wing, but also because more recently he starred in the hit film Get Out – which shows race relations in America to be a horror story.

It is hard to imagine what Clinton – who as secretary of state visited 112 countries and flew the equivalent of 38 times around the circumference of the world – must think when she sees political novice Trump striding the global stage. As he plugs his golf course, rattles old alliances and puts America’s commitment to democracy and human rights in question, she could be forgiven for dwelling on how the prize she thought was hers was snatched away.

She won the popular vote by nearly three million but lost the electoral college, where an agonising 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cost her a place in history as America’s first female president. “If just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had changed their minds, I would have won,” Clinton writes in her book, What Happened. “With a margin like that, everyone can have a pet theory about why I lost.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 8 November 2016. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Among them is her failure to campaign in Wisconsin during the general election; whoever scheduled her appearance here on Thursday must have a dark sense of humour. The recriminations continue. Maria Hamilton, whose mentally ill son Dontre was shot 14 times by a white Milwaukee police officer, and who joined other African American mothers affected by gun violence in campaigning with Clinton around the country, believes that skipping the state was a mistake.

“It was based on Wisconsin being a blue state,” she said this week. “They thought Wisconsin was covered; I knew she should have been there. I appreciate that they had their daughter and Bill Clinton and the Obamas, but I believe her staffers should have worked harder to have her there and Michigan and Ohio.”

Clinton did go to Wisconsin in March 2016 during the Democratic primaries. The Guardian followed her to an emotional event at a black church in Milwaukee with “Mothers of the Movement” whose children had been killed by gun violence or police. Some criticised her rival, Bernie Sanders, for neglecting the issue, but the Vermont senator won the primary – an ominous sign.

Hamilton, 57, said: “I know a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton and had no plans to vote for her. A lot of them were white people from the rural areas. We didn’t have enough black volunteers in Milwaukee to get black people out so we needed more volunteers in rural areas. I tell black people who didn’t vote that you’re just as responsible for Donald Trump being president as white people in rural areas because you didn’t go out and vote.”

Clinton, however, disputes that she took Wisconsin for granted. She writes in the book: “If our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger, of course we would have invested even more,” she writes. “I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there.”

The former first lady adds: “Here’s the bottom line: I campaigned heavily across Pennsylvania, had an aggressive ground game and lots of advertising, and still lost by 44,000 votes, more than the margin in Wisconsin and Michigan combined. So it’s just not credible that the best explanation for the outcome in those states – and therefore the election – was where I held rallies.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton at a book signing in Winnetka, Illinois, on 30 October 2017. Photograph: Cindy Barrymore/Rex/Shutterstock

Trump got roughly the same number of votes in Wisconsin as Mitt Romney in 2012 but Democratic turnout was down. Clinton notes that it was the state’s first major election that required voters to present a current driver’s licence, passport or state or military ID. A Mother Jones report found that more than half the state’s decline in turnout happened in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than four years earlier.

The final result still stings. Hamilton and other “Mothers of the Movement” went to Clinton’s election watch party in New York. “We were there to shatter the ceiling and we were very disappointed and blown away by the decision,” she recalled. “We didn’t stay for the final count. We went back to our hotel rooms and just called it a night. It was like a dream, almost an out of body experience.

“We felt all the travelling we did with Hillary Clinton reaching out to the voters, they were elated to have us talk about police reform and real change to stop all the violence, but we now know people reacted differently with their votes. What they showed us and what they did was a slap in the face. It was a betrayal of Dontre and the Jordan Davises and the Sandra Blands and all the babies whose lives are taken for being another colour.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Clinton supporter from Milwaukee attends her election night rally in New York on 8 November 2016. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

The Trump presidency has realised Hamilton’s worst fears on gun control and other issues. “We have a president who doesn’t care about human life. To say ‘Make America great again’ is to go back to oppression. America is an embarrassment to the world and Donald Trump is a disgrace to the human race. I am appalled by his total lack of respect for all the people who have died since he’s been in office, for example all these mass shootings.”

She regards him as a “monster” and white supremacist. “He’s never been a president for all of us. I refuse to call him my president. I will never call him a president of anything. I look forward to him being impeached. Him serving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a disaster we’re going to have to come back from. It will take time to undo the damage he’s done but we’re a powerful people.”

Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold, is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. For community organisers like Octavia Parker, the election outcome was a bitter pill. “I was totally blown out of the water,” she said. “I was flabbergasted, upset, disturbed. I could not believe the people elected Donald Trump president. I would like to have seen a female president in my lifetime; not to say that won’t happen.”

Parker, in her 50s, who is now focusing her work on getting young people to vote, added: “I think Hillary did damage herself by not coming to Wisconsin. I think she really felt she had it. Even so, she should have shown her face in the state. I don’t feel sorry for her at all – we need to move on, not get stuck.”

Milwaukee – population 595,000 – has, like many cities, suffered a long-term decline in manufacturing jobs. From 1970 to 2007, the share of families in the Milwaukee metropolitan area that were middle class shrank from 37% to 24%, while the percentage of poor households rose from 23% to 31%. In recent years there have been signs of a renaissance and construction boom recalling the 1920s, when new skyscrapers included the Empire Building – home to the Riverside Theatre, where Clinton will be surrounded by a French baroque interior including marble walls and floors, gold leaf mouldings and five giant chandeliers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bayview section of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

A short walk up Wisconsin Avenue is St James Episcopal church which, with a dwindling congregation, held its final service last week after 150 years. Office manager Bob Clarke, 68, is packing up. He said: “Clinton should have come to Wisconsin. She thought she had it sewn up. If she had come here, it would have given her an edge.” His friend Lawrence Steffen, 63, added: “She thought she could trust them. She thought she had an understanding with them and had to spend time in more iffy places. We’re traditionally a blue state, or that’s what she thought, which is making assumptions.”

Down the avenue is Mo’s Irish Pub, where Irish tricolours fly outside and signs point to Guinness. On Wednesday Louise Bode was drinking with fellow commodity traders. Recalling that disorienting night a year ago, she said: “I cried because I have a 12-year-old and I was afraid what the future would hold for her. I also know a family trying to secure a green card for the father of the family; now the children might not be with their dad. A diehard Republican who voted for Trump called me last week and said, ‘What the fuck?’ He’s got a son going into the military so it’s really serious.”

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Bode, 51, who canvassed on Clinton’s behalf, doubts that her absence from Wisconsin made much difference. “I think the big thing was James Comey [who made a late announcement that the FBI was re-examining Clinton’s emails]. Not coming to this state is a drop in the ocean compared to what happened with Comey.”

Elections have consequences. As Trump, the most powerful man on the planet, enjoys a state dinner and a cultural performance in Beijing, Clinton will be flogging her memoir on a dark and chilly night in Milwaukee. Next stop, Atlanta. But Bode added: “I don’t feel sorry for her because I don’t think she did it for herself. She did it for the country. So if anything, I feel sorry for the country.”