They said it was sad. They weren’t kidding.

HBO released a documentary this year, titled “The Final Year,” tracking the last days of the Obama administration. The documentary specifically follow former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, and former Secretary of State John Kerry.

I had heard from colleagues that the film is a trip, but I hadn’t actually seen it for myself until this week. So, bear with me a moment. Some of this is new for me.

We know the 2016 election caught many in politics and media by surprise.

We also know that few people took Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton harder than top members of the Obama administration, many of whom were hoping to have their legacies cemented by the former secretary of state.

We also know that Power is on record discussing a disastrous viewing party she hosted on Nov. 8, 2016, which HBO captured and she now characterizes as an incident that “triggers” for viewers a kind of “post-traumatic stress about their own election night experience, which mirrored mine.”

What I didn’t know until a recent viewing of “The Final Year” is that Trump’s victory momentarily broke Rhodes’ brain. HBO was there in November 2016 the moment he figured out Trump beat Hillary.

It’s every bit as sad as advertised:

One almost (almost) feels like giving the poor guy a hug. You’d think by his reaction that he just saw his dog get run over by a truck. It's almost as if his brain got the blue screen of death and he lost his ability to speak.

It’s well-known that Trump’s victory rocked the Obama administration. Many simply couldn’t believe it. Consider, for example, this terrifically insane Politico anecdote from December 2017 :



Afghanistan is 8½ hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States, and the American expatriates, Afghan elites and others who had managed to scare up invitations had gathered in the basement of the embassy—a city block-sized, blast-resistant compound as charmless as it is spotless—to watch the results of the American presidential election. The basement was dominated by State Department employees, who are officially barred from political activism while living abroad but tend to support Democrats; some, anticipating a Hillary Clinton victory, were even calling the occasion a party. On the wall hung a Donald Trump piñata.

By midmorning Kabul time, however, Trump had taken a commanding lead, and the mood in the embassy basement began to shift. Ties came undone, breakfast Danishes were anxiously devoured, and under the red, white and blue bunting, a stunned silence settled in. The cover band that had been playing earlier packed up its instruments. Some of the diplomats were typing furiously on their BlackBerrys. Others stepped outside to smoke, leaving behind a more Trump-friendly crowd of uniformed soldiers and veterans who had returned to Afghanistan as private contractors.



But as crazy as the night-and-day reactions in Kabul sound, they don’t quite stack up to this brutal HBO reaction footage of Rhodes.

The man quite literally can’t form a coherent sentence, which is saying something considering he is supposed to be a speechwriter.