An image of Hillary Clinton reacting with a beaming smile to the news that her former political rival Donald Trump had just received his fourth criminal indictment of the year has gone viral.
Mr Trump and 18 others were charged on Monday in a 41-count indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, following an investigation by District Attorney Fani Willis‘ office into his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election in the swing state.
The 45th president was caught on tape pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to help him “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to overcome Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the Peach State during an official phone call on 2 January 2021.
The publication of that audio after it was leaked to The Washington Post sparked a two-and-a-half year investigation by Ms Willis’s office, resulting in an extensive chargesheet ultimately approved by a grand jury.
Mr Trump – who secured a shock win over Ms Clinton in 2016 and went on to be impeached twice during a disastrous presidency – has already been indicted in three other criminal cases: once by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over the falsification of business records to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and twice by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith over the mishandling of classified documents and plotting to defraud the United States by seeking to overturn Mr Biden’s win.
As the former president predictably insisted the latest developments were all part of the same “witch hunt” concocted by his political enemies to thwart his comeback, Ms Clinton appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show to offer her thoughts.
Aside from struggling to conceal her obvious relish and chuckling heartily throughout, Ms Clinton was statesmanlike when she said she took no satisfaction in being proven correct about Mr Trump.
Instead, she said she felt only “a profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive”.
She continued: “He set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation… I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied.
“This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes.
“The only satisfaction may be that the system is working. That all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light and justice is being pursued.”
Despite her insistence that it is a “terrible moment”, Ms Clinton’s beaming face began making the rounds on social media.
“i am going to have this commissioned as a painting,” tweeted Tim Hogan.
“The moment we’ve all been waiting for,” wrote account Mueller, She Wrote.
In the same interview, the former first lady and secretary of state took the Republican Party to task for remaining in hock to the “cult” of Mr Trump and his imitators like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – urging it to abandon its allegiance to MAGA populism for the greater good of democracy.
She also criticised her rival’s attack last week on the US Women’s National Team following their premature exit from the Women’s World Cup, saying Mr Trump’s gloating was both unpatriotic and indicative of rampant misogyny, amounting to nothing less than “rooting against America”.
Ms Clinton was on air to discuss her new essay in The Atlantic entitled “The Weaponisation of Loneliness”, in which she argues that social isolation primes people for extremism and increases their susceptibility to the appeal of cynical “strongman” leaders like Mr Trump, who do not have their best interests at heart.
