hard to swallow

It is gutting to lose any national election, but this defeat will be particularly hard to swallow, because it means a decade of trying to convince our fellow Americans that they should draw the line at a commitment to bare-minimum procedural democracy will have failed.

“As somebody who has played primarily, I think, fairly sympathetic characters, it appealed to me the idea of playing a character that might rub people the wrong way and might be a little bit hard to swallow,” Lilly told The Times in 2015.

“There was a lot on the line for us too, I think just because of the season we had. … All the work that we’ve put in this year, and how well we’ve played over the course of the season to earn the No. 1 seed, to get that draw and get ousted would have been hard to swallow.”

“I didn't have any plans to transfer that last embryo tomorrow, but it's being told that you can't do something that's just hard to swallow.”

Even many 2008 Obama voters soon found that the media focus on Obama becoming the nation’s first Black president, at first so exciting, was hard to swallow on a day-to-day basis.