THIS week’s edition of “The Economist Asks”, our flagship interview podcast, features an interview with Hillary Clinton. The full transcript, lightly edited for clarity, follows. Listen to the podcast here. For a full list of all our podcasts, click here.

Hello and welcome to The Economists Asks. I’m your host Anne McElvoy. This week we’re asking what stops a woman from becoming president of the United States. I’m here with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, and together we’re talking to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, secretary of state and senator from New York. After a long career in law, policy and politics, Mrs Clinton, the former first lady from 1993 to 2001 had aspired to become the first female American president. But in one of the most dramatic races in US presidential history, she was defeated by Donald Trump in the elections nearly a year ago. “What happened?” is the title of her candid new book about why she lost.

The Economist: Hillary Clinton, welcome to The Economist Asks

Hillary Clinton: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

You write in the book that sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. It feels somehow off, you said, to picture a woman president sitting in the Oval Office or the situation room. How much of that sentiment and how much of the loss that flowed from it is down to sexism, and how much is down to you?

Well, as I say in the book, obviously I am the person who lost and so I take responsibility for my campaign and for my candidacy, but I thought it was important in the book to try to unpack the different factors that were at work. I don’t think there’s any doubt that sexism and misogyny, which are endemic in our society, were very much factors. They, in my view, were unleashed to an even greater extent than usual by Trump’s campaign, by him himself, by those who supported him. His relentless demeaning of women, starting in the Republican primary where he insulted based on her looks his only woman challenger, where he insulted women press personalities who were questioning him. It really laid down a marker that I think stayed very much alive throughout the campaign.

You did say though, that you found that the whole idea, to a lot of people, of a woman president felt off. Do you believe that [is true] in itself as well as Donald Trump’s record of the way he attacked the campaign?

Well I think that we’ve never had one, and therefore it is an act of imagination for people, voters, to think to themselves [of] a woman in the Oval Office, a woman commanding our military. And it does take an extra level of thought to be able to reconcile what are conflicting images and views, and what I think the Trump campaign did quite artfully actually, was to raise that issue in a way that it became a dominant question in the minds of people and certainly a set of attacks flowed from that.

For me it is particularly striking though because in so many ways the United States is the beacon of progress but there are what, I think there have been 70 leaders, female leaders around the world, and I think 15 countries now have female heads of government, and yet not the United States. Is there something peculiarly persistent about sexism in politics in America, and why?

Well Zanny, I think that there are two answers to this. One, it is in my view somewhat easier for a woman to rise to the head of government in a parliamentary system. The constituency that she serves gets to know her and can value her. The colleagues with whom she works can more readily recognise her leadership abilities. It’s a little more difficult in a presidential system where the head of state and head of government are the same person. But I also think in our presidential campaigns, it is a gauntlet one has to run, and it’s challenging for anybody, man or woman, but for women in particular. It’s taken us this long until my nomination to ever get the nomination of a major party, and I think that was a significant breakthrough, because I did after all win the popular vote. So there is not a wholesale rejection of a woman president, but I think we have work to do to try to make sure that certain voters, certain parts of the country feel more comfortable with the idea.

But doesn’t that work have to be done both amongst men and women, because the striking thing about your loss is not just that you lost very heavily amongst white working class women, but that you also didn’t win as strongly as many people expected amongst college-educated women.

You’re right; I eked out a very narrow margin among white college-educated women. I won overwhelmingly with black women and Latina women, and I think there are several factors. I mean, one is I actually got more white women’s votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. So this is a problem for the Democratic Party and the Democratic nominee. But I think it’s also very clear that gender has not up until now played the kind of motivating role that race did with Barack Obama’s election. Women are much more torn by competing interests.

Did you underestimate that?

Well, I don’t know whether I underestimated it. I certainly knew it, because I knew what the history with Democratic nominees happened to be and how difficult it was to get white women’s vote. Forget about the white men’s vote! But I think I myself could have perhaps done a better job in reaching out and reassuring women and white voters in general, and I think I was on my way to winning as I say in the book, until Jim Comey’s letter, aided and abetted by the Russian WikiLeaks information weaponisation. So I don’t blame voters for feeling like okay, it’s okay to vote for me, but then having something interrupt that thought process and their decision being put on hold and eventually going against me.

We’re talking here in Britain. A couple of weeks ago I watched Theresa May here losing her voice, have that terrible coughing fit during her speech at the Conservative Party conference, and of course she wreaked a whirlwind really in the coverage. Would there have been such criticism if she’d been a man? Are there double standards? Or is there just a level of political competence that you have to master, man or woman? How did you feel about that moment?

I think it’s both. You do need to master a level of political competence. That’s I think fair to say, and it’s true. But I do think women are judged much more harshly for the slightest slip-up, a gaffe–something like losing one’s voice. You know, I’ve lost my voice, my husband’s lost his voice...

Did you feel for her?

I did feel for her. I don’t know why it happened. Allergies are often a problem, talking too much can be a problem. Whatever the reason. But I never saw it held against any male politician the way that I saw it held against her.

So weakness or perceived weakness is held against you even as strength is also held against you.

That’s the double bind. You’re too weak to be president or prime minister. You’re too strong and therefore off-putting, and not the kind of woman who should be president or prime minister.

So how do we–we’re all women here–how do we get beyond that?

You know I don’t think there’s any solution other than to just keep knocking on all these obstacles, and I say in the book that the best way to combat sexism in politics is to get more women into politics. Because what usually happens is there’s one woman on the stage that becomes the token and the icon. So that woman’s dress and hairstyle and voice level – everything becomes almost stereotypical. We need more women on the stage so that yes, we come in all sizes and shapes and hairstyles and we wear pants or we wear dresses and skirts, so that it becomes more normalised. And until we get that it is just a really hard boring of hard boards, as Max Weber would say about politics.

Let’s turn to another subject in the news, a rather disturbing one. You’ve said that you’re shocked, appalled by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. And of course you’ve distanced yourself, you’ve condemned what he did. But does it give you pause for thought? How carefully did you check the background of your donors? What are the lessons to learn here?

I think there a lot of lessons for everybody to learn. With respect to him specifically, he’s been a supporter of Democrats for decades, as a strong supporter of mine, a strong supporter of President Obama and many others. And we do vet donors and that shows you what was and wasn’t in the public arena in terms of specific knowledge. Because I certainly, as the Obamas themselves said, was surprised and disgusted by these revelations.

But there is a network of people who know each other well and we’re now seeing so many people come out, and a lot of them are at least sympathetic to the Democratic cause. I supposed my hunch is there is an incuriosity sometimes within groups, within elites, left or right, where they don’t want to ask awkward questions about people they are comfortable with and know socially.

With our vetting, and I know this is true for the Obamas as well, we turn down a lot of people. So if information comes that is you know, troubling, we act on it. And all I can tell you is that no such information came. It may have been a well-kept unfortunate secret in entertainment circles. But even some of the women who have come out–I’ve been at events with them. I know them. And no-one has ever said anything. And so part of it was, I guess, as they have all described, the fear factor, that they wouldn’t be believed, they wouldn’t tell anybody. Until finally the dam broke. And I can’t speak to why it didn’t break sooner, but now that it has he’s facing consequences, but I don’t want to lose sight of the larger problem. Shining a bright spotlight on just him is missing the point. We have a confessed sexual assaulter in our White House. So we can’t just say, oh my gosh, condemn this one person and move on. This is a larger problem in society.

The interesting question for me is to what degree will this be a defining moment. As you say, in many ways the Trump revelations were not a defining moment. Nothing very much changed. There was a kind of collective shrugging. Now is this going to be a defining moment and what does that mean? At some point, I think, we are getting to the stage where this is absolutely not acceptable and people come out, people start talking about it, and we will change, but we seem to be a long way from this.

I hope so. I can’t answer that question because I thought Hollywood Access was a defining moment. And then all of the revelations that followed it by other women stepping forward. But here’s how clever the Trump campaign is. Put this into context. So on October 7th, in the morning, as I write in the book, two of our top security and intelligence officials say the Russians hacked the DNC and the Russians pose a threat to our election. A few hours later, the Hollywood Access tape comes out. Within an hour, the theft of John Podesta, my campaign chairman’s, emails, are out on WikiLeaks. Now, if you think about this, the Hollywood Access story was wall-to-wall coverage for 48–72 hours, and then it faded. WikiLeaks were dribbled out a thousand a day for the next month. And people kind of thought, well, I know all about this Hollywood Access tape. I want to find out about WikiLeaks. And then stories were made up, fake news was created, the most horrible allegations that you know, I’m running a child trafficking ring with John Podesta. Just absurd! Total lies.

I went to the pizza restaurant many times that was supposedly the centre of it.

Yes, it didn’t have a basement for one thing. So this all of a sudden takes over people’s Google searches, and they’re hunting for information. So I think there’s both a warning that we can’t let this go on, and the spotlight needs to be sharp and people need to be held accountable, but there’s also another lesson about how easy it is to get diverted from matters by those who wish us to be diverted.

But here’s the thing. Let’s turn to the future of the Democratic Party, which I know is very much on your mind. You are looking to the future as well as to what happened to you. A couple of times you’ve used the word “clever” about the Trump campaign or the way that they operate. As you look to what the Democrats need to do from here, what the agenda should be, is there a part of you that is worried that you consider this to be the right, the beneficial direction, but the other side are smarter, they’re cannier, they’re getting away with more–that’s why they’re winning.

I think that is a lesson from the 2016 campaign. This was our first reality TV candidate. And the performance art that reality TV has helped to create was very effective in reaching out to people in a kind of visceral, entertaining way. And I think Democrats, I would argue political leaders on all sides of every issue in every Western democracy, have to pay attention to this. Not to give up your principles or your values, not to, you know, decide you’re going to compete on racism or misogyny or Islamophobia, or anything else that Trump used in this election. But you got to be more effective in grabbing attention and holding on to it, and understanding the power of online communication, and standing against the Russians or anybody else who wishes to propagandise against you.

Let me push back a little bit on that. Because it seems to me that you’re taking somewhat of an easy explanation. Another way of looking at 2016 is that actually, people didn’t know what you stood for. There wasn’t a really clear, animating idea, and that now when one looks at the Democratic Party, it’s still not clear what is the animating idea behind it, and loathing of Donald Trump seems to be the one thing that sort of grips everybody within the party. But I’m not sure that loathing of Donald Trump and criticism of him, which you’ve given us a lot of too, is enough of a recipe of success.

There certainly is a basis to it. I would argue that anybody who paid attention knew what I stood for, knew what I had done and knew what I would do. That I had a record that anybody could look at. I had a policy agenda that was well developed on income inequality, on healthcare, on everything else that matters, but that I could not get coverage to any of that, which was new. When Obama ran in 2008, policy got 224 minutes on the nightly news, by 2012, it was I think like 174 minutes. Well, by the time we come along in 2016, all policy is given 32 minutes. Now, you can say well, oh but if only had a smarter slogan, if you only had a better whatever whatever–

I think it’s just not a slogan. Because if I look back at our debates over your policies and Donald Trump’s policies, you know, we looked very carefully. We are as wonky and loving of policy as you can get, and yet I found it hard to encapsulate briefly what it was that you stood for.

Well, you know, I’m sorry about that. And I loved your endorsement, so clearly some people found what I was saying pretty convincing. But I’m not going to argue with that, because clearly it didn’t work. So whatever might have worked, I got three million more votes, so clearly far more voters understood what I stood for and what I wanted to do. But in terms of combating a message that was really aimed at stoking anger and resentment and grievance, I plead inadequate. Because I did not know how to combat what was from the very first day of the Trump campaign an incredibly hate-filled tirade first against immigrants, and then with increasing numbers of people who were being scapegoated and blamed for whatever ailed you. And I say in the book, you know, I understood the anger people felt because I talked about it endlessly. I talked about the disaster of the financial crisis and how people still hadn’t recovered. So I was saying, but we’ve gotta go on, and here’s what we can do, and I had very specific proposals that would have really helped people and their families. But I didn’t say, you know what, you should hate everybody, and you should be really burned up about this. I didn’t do that. Now maybe I could have done a little more of that without crossing my own line of what was appropriate.

Can I push you into the future on that, and if we can come to the Democratic Party as we look forward, and you know what might be a kind of remedy for what Zanny just mentioned there. What might we be engaging with on The Economist next time? What is it that would stop the centre-left kind of collapsing between centre-left and left of the party? You’ve also had a bit of that, that was on your plate even as you ran for the nomination. But if this appeal to the white working classes is so difficult, what do you see the Democrats needing to do to stop the next candidate going through what you went through?

Well I think you’ve gotta have a strong economic argument and you’ve gotta deliver it in a way that people understand, believe and vote on. But I disagree with the idea that it has to be economics, economics, economics. I think you’ve got to recognise, yes there was economic anxiety but there was cultural anxiety, and the more we looked into what motivated people to vote for Trump, was cultural anxiety. You know, so we can’t give up our principles, we can’t turn the clock back on civil rights, and human rights, and gay rights and the things that I’m very proud of as Americans moving forward. But we have to figure out how better to address it. Now I would add this one point: voter suppression in our country is being used as an incredibly strong tool to prevent African-Americans and young people from voting. The post-election analyses in Wisconsin for example estimate that between 100,000 to 200,000 people who were eligible to vote were prevented from voting. So before we go chasing people who may never vote for a Democrat, we need to do a better job to stand up to voter suppression, to stand up against the illegal gerrymandering that the Republicans engage in, to stand up to the phony commission that Trump has going to try to prevent “voter fraud” when it’s just another charade and excuse for doing more to suppress votes. And then yes, if we have strong economic messages that break through and we get more white voters, all the better.

But is there a risk in that strategy, which clearly those are all laudable things that everyone would want to happen—less gerrymandering, no voter suppression—but that said, if the Democratic Party pushes and makes that its main focus, that it is seen as the party of identity politics.

Well you can’t make it the main focus, but you can’t drop it off the table. You know, I beat Bernie Sanders by four million votes, okay. So that was a landslide by any definition. He was very clear that there was only one message, a single message about billionaires, you know, take back America from the billionaires, and he had ideas which were hard for him to explain but he never had to explain them except in one editorial board meeting with the New York Daily News. Otherwise, he could just hammer away. Now, he lost the Democratic primary, and so I’m arguing that it can’t be either-or, it has to be both-and. So when people say, you know, just give up on that civil rights stuff, don’t talk about it. Look what Trump is doing. He’s playing to his base by demeaning black athletes who are standing up against racism, or kneeling down against racism and injustice. You know, what are the Democrats supposed to say? Oh, we don’t want to talk about it, oh it’s too controversial? No! Stand up for what you believe in and what you know is right. If it costs you votes, go find the votes somewhere else. I didn’t do a good enough job fighting suppression and finding the votes somewhere else. But I am determined to make sure the Democratic Party doesn’t make the mistake of walking away from so many of the values and [the] progress that we have helped to bring about.

This gets you going, doesn’t it?

It does! Because I know the debate that’s going on. Like you know, “just don’t talk about it.” Well no! It’s wrong.

That debate is indeed going on. And we’re getting to the end of 2017 and we have a Democratic Party that, I think if you’re being charitable, is split. And if you’re not being charitable, is just all over the shop. And so when I’m in the US and I’m talking to people, I hear a lot of people, a lot of serious Democrats say, it’s perfectly plausible that Donald Trump wins again.

We don’t have any idea whether that’s true. You know, I’m tired of people, even in my own party, even friends of mine, who aren’t willing to do the hard work of building a party that can win. They’d rather sit and pontificate about all of the problems that we face. That’s why I started a new organisation called Onward Together. I am funding and supporting grassroots groups that are recruiting candidates, particularly young women, that are training them, that are standing up for a lot of the progressive causes that I believe in. Because, you know, I’m not going to sit around and worry about what happens in 2020. I’m going to try to build a party that can win in 2018. If we take back the house in 2018, and it is plausible because I won 24 congressional districts with Republican incumbents in them, then everything changes.

Who are the rising stars who are catching your eye in the party? I’m thinking of people like Deval Patrick or Kamala Harris.

There’s a whole suite of them. I’m not going to mention them

Come on, a name or two

No no, I’m not going to because then I’ll leave off a friend. There’s so many of them.

Well we can come back and get that from you another time…

There are a lot of excellent potential candidates, but again some of them have to get re-elected in 2018, and some of them have to figure out how they’re going to help other Democrats get elected in 2018. I don’t think this will gel until after the midterm election, and then, you know, we’ll see who’s serious and who’s not. Look, I’ve had personal conversations with a number of people who are being touted as potential candidates. They know the price you pay. They know that there is a whole industry on the right that will just strip them down. And look what happened—I’m off the stage, and all of a sudden Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar—women I know well and respect, are standing up and speaking out and getting hammered. And the new phrase is they’re being “Hillary’d”. My name with an apostrophe D. Because you’ve got them being told to cease and desist. Be quiet. Don’t do this. Listen to her voice, it’s too shrill, it’s not this, it’s not that. So all of this attention on me, which some would like to think was only about me, which is another mistake, and if they don’t learn that lesson, we’re never going to get a woman president. All of a sudden now we see, ah, she’s gone, let’s turn on any woman who might dare to run for president and see what we can do to her.

Can we turn to another subject, and another part of Hillary Clinton, which is Hillary Clinton the former secretary of state. I would love to know, what you think is the single most dangerous thing that Donald Trump is doing in the international arena right now? And you’ve got a lot to choose from.

I do have a lot to choose from. I think it’s the combination of the way he is behaving and speaking about North Korea, and his apparent intention to fail to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement. Now why in heaven anyone would want to have two nuclear crises? One is more than enough for anybody in the Oval Office to try to deal with. But that shows both his impulsiveness and his personal pique that can’t ever be satisfied unless he looks like he’s dominating and winning. His diplomacy by Twitter, with respect to Kim Jong Un, is playing right into Kim Jong Un’s hands, and creating a very dangerous situation for the region and for us. His decertifying Iran is actually helping Iran, not hurting Iran, because we put a lid. I started the negotiations with Iran. We did put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program. That didn’t end all of Iran’s bad behaviour, it wasn’t intended to. But it was intended to give us a little more leeway to deal with that bad behaviour, not having to worry about centrifuges spinning away in underground facilities.

How dangerous is this really? How much sleep do you lose over the possibility that the United States really could cause an international conflagration, whether it’s a nuclear war in North Korea or whatever? Have you started to discount the diplomacy by Twitter?

No, I’m very worried about it, because take Iran, he was advised by all of his close advisers as far as I’m aware, not to do this. So clearly somebody else is whispering in his ear or he’s talking to himself. And anything Barack Obama has his name on or did, he wants to undo and denigrate. Think about this: we negotiated that deal with five other countries and the EU, and all of a sudden America’s word is no good? That a guy who can’t point to any evidence, it would be different if he were able to stand up and say “we know they’ve started the facility at Fordow, they’re spinning again.” No such evidence exists.

So what is the cost of this? Assume that we don’t have a nuclear war and nothing catastrophic happens before 2020, do you then go back to the world as it was before? Does the US role go back to as it was before, or is the US-led liberal world order in some fundamental sense something that we’ve gone beyond now?

Well we don’t know yet. Certainly I worry that it’s the latter, but I’m hoping that the damage he’s doing to global stability, to America’s role in the world, to counting on American leadership, and the word that that we give, can be remedied by getting a new congress, by getting a new president. So I’m not prepared to say, but I will just quickly add this: there are fissures and cracks in Western democracy. Otherwise you would not have a Brexit vote, you would not have the far right and the far left rising up in Europe and North America. You would have a necessary reckoning about what was not successful and trying to reign in powerful forces who only care about wealth and ideology and their own position. But we’ve got all of these divisions. He didn’t create them, he masterfully played upon them and exploited them, and we better deal with that regardless of who’s in the White House.

We’re coming to the end of our podcast chat with you. I know a lot more about you from the book now, because I know about your yoga. I know about the chardonnay, which makes me feel a bit better frankly. I think that balanced out all the bits about the yoga. Is there anything you’re up to that might surprise us a bit?

Well that’s a great question. I don’t know other than I’m having a very good time going out on the book tour. I’m happy to be here in London talking to you. But I’m also getting to spend a lot more time with my grandchildren, a lot more time with my friends, which is a blessing, because they are my greatest support system.

No new hobbies…? So the next ten years will be finding out about…?

Maybe, but not yet. I had to write the book in six months and get it out there, so that pretty much consumed 2017.

Hillary Clinton, thank you very much for joining us on The Economist Asks. If you’re not a listener, are you going to add us to your podcast list?

I certainly am now.

Great, we’ll be getting your feedback. Thank you very much.