The video of a buckling and stumbling Hillary Clinton lurching into the arms of her security staff at Ground Zero in NY may increase pressure on the Democratic presidential candidate to release her detailed medical records, U.S. media reported on Monday. Trump himself has released minimal information about his health.
Advertisement
Clinton even canceled a West Coast trip to rest.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves after leaving an apartment building Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, in NY.
She later left her daughter’s apartment, saying she was “feeling great” and waving at the crowd, per the Associated Press. She paused to take photos and waved to onlookers before heading to her Chappaqua home.
Despite the intense focus on Clinton falling ill on Sunday, Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center, said the moment told voters little about Clinton’s physical fitness.
It was unclear when she had been scheduled to leave the ceremony.
In December 2012, Clinton fainted and sustained a concussion after a stomach virus and dehydration prevented her from initially testifying before Congress, which was investigating the Benghazi, Libya, attack.
The incident compounds an already hard time for Clinton as the presidential race enters its final stretch.
Ms Clinton spent about 90 minutes at the 9/11 event on Sunday, standing alongside numerous other dignitaries, including New York’s Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand.
Some specialists cautioned against making too much of Sunday’s episode.
From seasonal pollen allergies to hypothyroidism, here’s what we know about the 68-year-old presidential candidate’s health. He called it “akin to predicting an influenza epidemic based [on] a candidate’s sneezing”. A video posted on Twitter appeared to show her staggering and tripping on a curb as three people helped her into a vehicle.
She had to be helped up by two Secret Service guards as her team rushed to help her and stopped her hitting the ground.
Mr Trump, who attended the same event marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, was noticeably restrained. As might be expected, Republicans in general – and the Trump campaign in particular – are virtually salivating over the possibilities of Hillary Clinton being in an overheated and weakened state.
Clinton tried to make light of that event. She got overheated! But she’s fine now!
“I think they did the right thing”.
The remark, for which she later expressed “regret”, had suddenly united a Republican Party that has struggled to get behind its divisive nominee, it said.
And as the New York Times’s Adam Nagourney tweeted on Sunday morning, now might be a good time for Clinton to release a fuller record of her medical history.
As with other problems that have dogged Clinton on the campaign trail, opponents said the candidate’s refusal to provide basic information, in this case health records, seeds distrust and skepticism about an issue that could have an easy explanation.
“We really haven’t gotten very much, essentially a letter from her doctor”, he told CNN, but added that Trump should be held to the same requirement. Or rather it will force Clinton to have a conversation about her health in the race.
The episode thrust questions about Clinton’s health and the transparency of her campaign squarely into the last two months of the race, which many polls show has grown tighter, the leading newspaper said.
Her doctors have said she fully recovered.
No longer can Trump’s questions about her physical stamina be summarily dismissed.
He declined to say anything Sunday, keeping a pledge not to campaign on the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Neither Clinton nor Trump has released anything approaching that level of detail.
Instead, in December, Trump’s doctor wrote in a short letter that was made public that his blood pressure and laboratory results “were astonishingly excellent” and that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.
Advertisement
He later revealed in an interview with The Washington Post that it was written in five minutes as a limousine sent by Trump’s campaign staff waited outside his office to ferry it back to the campaign.
