Clinton’s doc says she has pneumonia
Democratic nominee had physical, verbal stumbles
Averbal stumble on Friday. An actual stumble on Sunday.
What was supposed to be a quiet New York weekend for Hillary Clinton turned into a tumultuous and potentially damaging 48-hour stretch, during which she was forced to retract an inflammatory generalization about her opponent’s supporters and confront new questions about her health.
The Democratic presidential nominee made an early departure from the 9/11 anniversary memorial at Ground Zero on Sunday morning. Videos showed her leaning against a pillar, then appearing to buckle forward, looking faint, as she shuffled toward a van with Secret Service agents holding her by each arm.
Clinton’s campaign initially said she merely “felt overheated” at the ceremony, where she had been for 90 minutes and was “feeling much better” after she rested at her daughter’s apartment. Clinton made a point of leaving the building alone, waving and saying she felt “great.” Five hours later, her doctor revealed she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.
“She was put on antibiotics and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated,” Dr. Lisa Bardack wrote.
The stumble plays into the rhetoric of Republican Donald Trump, who has accused Clinton without evidence of lacking “stamina” and whose campaign has pushed unsubstantiated theories about videos of her laughing and coughing. The episode has already propelled her health from right-wing media to the mainstream: NBC did two Sunday special reports on the subject.
Clinton, who had a concussion in 2012, last year released a two-page letter from Bardack on her history. Bardack called her a “healthy 67year-old female whose current medical conditions include hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies,” and said she was “in excellent physical condition and fit to serve as president of the United States.”
Her campaign has declined to provide the detailed records disclosed in 2008 by John McCain, then 71. Trump, 70, has surrendered even less information, releasing only a hyperbolic letter from a gastroenterologist who claimed that Trump would be “the healthiest individual elected to the presidency.” The doctor, Harold Bornstein, later admitted that he “rushed” off the letter in five minutes, trying to make Trump “happy.”
“McCain set the standard. The medical reports from Clinton’s and Trump’s personal physicians do not suffice,” Dr. David Scheiner, who wrote Barack Obama’s medical summary in 2008, said Friday in the Washington Post. Clinton’s incident came less than a day after she tried to manage the fallout from her remarks at a New York fundraiser on Friday, during which she said “half” of Trump’s supporters fall into a “basket of deplorables” — “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”
Amid a Saturday media storm, she expressed “regret” for sizing the bigoted group at “half.” But she conspicuously refused to retract the substance of the claim, saying “It’s deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia.”
The remark appeared to violate one of the basic tenets of campaigns — never insult the voters — and it infuriated Trump devotees. Some analysts likened it to Mitt Romney’s 2012 disparagement of “47 per cent” of the electorate. But others argued that it was both empirically true and not a gaffe at all, since it forced another discussion of Trump’s bigotry and his most odious devotees.