Voters don’t trust Hillary, and she has got no one to blame but herself

Hillary Clinton is intelligent, well-intentioned and ferociously ambitious. But she’s also terrible at retail politics. Voters don’t like her and, worse, they don’t trust her.

The former she can do nothing about. The latter is her own fault, as this latest email controversy shows. Her first mistake was obviously to use a private email server for her work as secretary of state – something that the FBI described as “extremely careless”.

Others interpret it as a deliberate attempt to control the flow of information and a contravention of federal law on record keeping.

She did hand over thousands of emails to FBI investigators that had passed through her server, but she also deleted over 30,000 on the grounds that they were personal.

It’s the perception of the obsessive need for control that gives the impression she’s eternally up to something.

Clinton runs a tight operation. Loyalists keep her protected, but a culture of blind loyalty can lead to errors of judgment. These new emails came via an FBI investigation into Anthony Weiner, a former congressman accused of sending sexually explicit texts to a minor.

Weiner is an egotist and a sex addict: his disgrace during a campaign to become New York City mayor was actually captured in a documentary that he stupidly agreed to take part in. So was the humiliation of his then wife, Huma Abedin.

Abedin, who is recently estranged from Weiner, is one of Clinton’s closest advisers and her friend.

Throughout the filming of the documentary, as Abedin sacrificed her dignity to defend her husband, Clinton was rumoured to be distancing herself from her. But she never, obviously, cut the knot. This was a huge mistake.

In August 2015, Donald Trump tweeted that the link from Clinton to Abedin to Weiner was “a major security risk.” There is no substantive evidence for this assertion but on a broader political level it is true.

A smarter candidate for the presidency would have dropped the toxic Weiner family years ago. Clinton hugged Abedin close for far too long.

Trump believes his Christmas has come early. I doubt it. He’s also faced various investigations for his foundation and university. The latter is regarded by some as having been a fraud. During its operation, Trump said that he hand-picked the very best to work at his academy, but dozens of those he hired turned out to have financial problems or convictions for drug trafficking and child molestation.

The polls suggest most Americans have made up their minds and many are voting for whatever they regard as the “least worst” option. Both sides do have intense supporters, as the growth of conspiracy thinking shows.

The Trumpites have their conspiracy about Hillary’s emails and now the Clinton fans have theirs – that the FBI director is trying, for whatever reason, to upset her campaign.

Realistically, however, they have little to worry about: the investigation will not push moderate voters towards a Republican candidate who has in three decades of doing business faced no less than 4,095 lawsuits.

Meanwhile, the FBI will probably take a while to work through these new emails and give the public its verdict. This means that America may elect someone under investigation, which only adds to the sense of a presidency that is dead on arrival.

To get thus far she built a court, dodged scrutiny, cosied up to the rich and powerful. Probably more shocking that anything in her emails is the allegation that the Clinton Foundation was used to buy and sell influence at the state department. That might be what congressional Republicans will use most effectively against her.

The tragedy is that the appearance of clandestine behaviour was never necessary. It was a self-inflicted wound.