It helped Trump with his ludicrous assertion that Hillary didn’t have “the strength and the stamina” to be president.
Do you think this garbage happens by accident?
As we slog through yet another week of media onslaught saying “Biden’s old, old, old so everybody’s going to vote for Trump!” I thought I’d remind people of 2016, when one of the ongoing narratives was that Hillary Clinton was frail and dying from some unrevealed illness.
I wrote this for Salon back in 2016:
The right-wing smear machine is working at warp speed to convince the nation that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. That is not hyperbole or some kind of a joke. They are literally claiming that she is hiding a physical and mental disability that renders her unfit for office. And they are, as usual, being helped by members of the mainstream media who are simply unable to resist “reporting” such a juicy tale even knowing that it is absurd. And so it becomes part of the narrative, true or not, that will color the rest of the campaign and Clinton’s presidency should she win.
Karl Rove first crudely suggested that Clinton had a serious brain disorder when she fell and suffered a concussion a few years ago which required her to wear her thick prism glasses instead of contacts to correct temporary double vision. Nobody took him seriously at the time, but the rumor has been percolating in the fever swamps and Trump and company were obviously aware of it. Trump himself has been saying from the beginning that Clinton doesn’t have the “strength or the stamina” to be president. He also claims that she can’t campaign more than a couple of days a week and then she has to go hide and recover. (This is one of those lies so blatant that it renders people mute — Clinton is clearly campaigning constantly, indeed she’s out there more than he is.)
This attack was echoed by Matt Drudge as far back as October when he appeared on conspiracy monger Alex Jones’ show and said “she’s old and she’s sick, she is not a viable, vibrant leader for this country.” It’s no surprise then that this latest full blown swiftboat offensive began on Drudge’s web site. It’s one of his specialties.
On Aug. 7 he linked to an obscure right wing website that had posted a picture of Clinton tripping on some porch steps and being steadied by a couple of aides under the title “2016: Hillary Conquers the Stairs.” He neglected to mention that the picture was taken in February.
The next salvo came from Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer which published a screaming headline “Hillary Clinton’s Secret Health Crisis.” And according to Ben Collins at the Daily Beast, “by the middle of the day the No. 2 trending Google search about Hillary Clinton was: “Is Hillary having health problems?”
That night Trump surrogate Sean Hannity devoted his show to fanning the rumors, even bringing in the Fox Medical A-Team who appear regularly on the network to diagnose her from afar and demand to see a complete neurological workup and all of Clinton’s medical records. He continued the rumor mongering throughout the week.
By this time the fall was old news. Now she was said to be having seizures and speaking oddly and having weird expressions on her face and exhibiting muddled thinking. When a protester tried to rush the stage at one of her rallies and a secret service agent stepped to the podium and said they had things under control, people said he had a diazepam pen in his hand at the ready, apparently in case she had a seizure right there on the spot. (It’s all rubbish, of course.)
Meanwhile, the “Alt-right” has gone completely over the edge with this craziness. Collins writes that the conspiracy site Info Wars has turned over its entire site to these rumors:
Hillary Clinton supposedly has Parkinson’s disease, syphilis, brain damage, a brain tumor, autism, a degenerative disease that is giving her seizures and/or strokes, and a blood clot, according to InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson. Oh, and he says she has a drug problem. All of these diagnoses — save for Parkinson’s, which commanded a separate full-length article—came in a single one of Watson’s YouTube videos released on Thursday. It now has over 1.6 million views at press time.
And yes the mainstream media has joined in the fun. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews has devoted several segments to the issue, apparently convinced that where Republicans blow smoke there must be fire saying, “what are the Republicans up to on this health issue? Why are they on to this? What do they know? Is there something we don’t know in the health records? Something that could change this election around?”
Newspapers are running stories pointing out that she uses a stool on stage when someone else is giving a speech as evidence that she’s too weak to stand. Web sites are posting picture arrays of Clinton using a pillow behind her back as if that’s a sign that she “needs propping up.” Dr Drew Pinsky of Celebrity Rehab weighed in saying that he’s concerned that Clinton isn’t getting the proper medical care for “her condition.” (Even Newt Gingrich called that “junk medicine.“) And fake medical records appeared out of nowhere and started making the rounds prompting Clinton’s physician to reiterate her earlier declaration that Clinton was a healthy woman capable of handling the duties of president.
Last night Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson took it to a new level by offering up a full diagnosis on MSNBC, saying there are “reports of observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms,” that Clinton suffers from “dysphasia” — a neurological condition that limits a person’s ability to communicate or understand speech. I’m going to take a guess that Pierson didn’t come up with those talking points herself.
This confluence of activity didn’t happen by chance. It was planned and executed from InfoWars to Youtube to Drudge to Hannity to The Daily Mail to MSNBC and finally the NBC Nightly News and The New York Times. And regardless of what the fact checks say, a whole lot of people in this country now believe that Hillary Clinton, a woman of great intelligence and impressive endurance, is a brain-damaged invalid.
And then there was this, just a few months later:
After 24 hours of fulminating over Friday night’s commentary from Hillary Clinton about “baskets of deplorables” and Donald Trump’s stated willingness to start a war if someone flips an American the bird, everyone seemed more than ready for a day of national unity to commemorate 9/11. Then Clinton had a fainting spell and all hell broke loose.
The press went into full-blown breaking-news mode and when tape emerged of Clinton wobbling and appearing to faint as she got into her car, the cable networks and journalists on social media went with wall to wall with breathless medical speculation. They showed the video in slow motion over and over again like it was an outtake from the Zapruder film scene in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (“back and to the left, back and to the left.”)
She emerged from her daughter’s home smiling and waving a few hours later (prompting hilarious right-wing conspiracy theories that it must have been a body double.) But when her doctor released a statement saying she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, the press became hysterical.
At that moment media outlets could have chosen to analyze Clinton’s pressing on with the campaign in spite of having pneumonia as an indication of her grit and dedication to the campaign. And in fairness some did. For instance, contrary to the widely assumed rumor that she’d been taking it easy all month, Jeff Zeleny of CNN said that he’d covered five presidential campaign and never seen a more brutal schedule than Clinton’s.
Or the media organizations could have taken Clinton’s doctor at her word that she is being treated and will recover nicely. Instead, they settled on their tedious narrative of righteous indignation about Clinton’s supposed pathological secretiveness in failing to inform them of her diagnosis the minute she received it. It’s all about them.
New @CNN: Hillary Clinton’s stumble highlights campaign transparency problems https://t.co/X4liGwmHBl pic.twitter.com/EVy48jfM6h
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) Sept. 11, 2016
They also know very well that this febrile coverage plays into an ongoing theme of the presidential campaign: Donald Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have “the strength or the stamina” to be president. On one level, it’s a simple sexist charge against a woman candidate from a man who believes that all of life is a game of primitive dominance. But it’s more than that. Trump made the same charge against Jeb Bush during the primaries; in that case it was the taunt of a schoolyard bully.
And there has been yet another layer to Trump’s “strength and stamina” charge in recent weeks, leveled first by surrogates like Alex Jones, Breitbart News and Matt Drudge and taken up recently by the campaign itself, which has implied that Clinton was suffering from brain damage and possibly Parkinson’s disease. I wrote about this elaborate conspiracy theory a couple of weeks ago.
Despite the fact that this is a right-wing smear, “the health issue” has worked its way into the mainstream press, leading to coverage of a couple of coughing fits as if they were obvious signs that she’s on death’s door and current events as if they show something is seriously wrong. (How pneumonia relates to brain damage has yet to be explained.)
But the truth is that coughs and throat problems are probably the most common problem a politician has. And when one personally hugs, shakes hands and gets breathed on by thousands of people in a week, getting pneumonia isn’t really all that surprising either. It’s obvious that if the Drudge smear wasn’t in full bloom, this story would have been covered differently. Instead, unable to resist the lure of the sexy tabloid lede, Politico just let it all hang out: Clinton scare shakes up the race Physical weakness caught on camera turns health conspiracy into a legitimate campaign concern.
The fact is that politicians get sick. Indeed, presidents get sick. George W. Bush fainted in the White House just sitting on a couch eating pretzels. His father famously caught the flu while traveling, grew faint and vomited on the prime minister of Japan‘s lap.
President Ronald Reagan was shot and had cancerous polyps removed from his colon while in office. Lyndon Johnson had gall bladder surgery while holding the top office in the land and proudly showed his scar to the press corps. President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. There’s no need to reiterate all of President Franklin Roosevelt’s health problems, but it’s pretty clear that the right wing and the press today would find him unfit for office.
And the list of macho men who have fainted in public is a lot longer than you might think. This is just a sample:
General Petraeus faints at congressional hearing.
Major General James Martin fainting at a press conference in February.
Attorney General Michael Mukasy fainting in the middle of a speech in 2008.
GE CEO Jim Campbell collapsing at a Joe Biden speech in 2010.
Silvio Berlosconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, collapsing in 2006.
Bill Daley passing out at his commerce secretary appointment ceremony in 1996.
A 23-year-old soccer player collapsing during a live interview.
A soldier fainting, waiting for dignitaries to arrive.
To put it simply, if you discard the inane right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s alleged brain damage and Parkinson’s disease, you’ll realize that ailments like coughing, fainting, pneumonia, flu, etc., are common among politicians and other leaders because they’re common among humans.
Despite some truly ridiculous speculation from members of the press, this is unlikely to be more than a slight blip on the campaign. It’s pneumonia not a brain tumor and she will recover. But it’s almost sure that the drumbeat for her to release her full medical records for the press to paw through for juicy tidbits is going to become louder and she’ll undoubtedly end up complying. Medical privacy is not allowed for presidential candidates.
Well, unless they are named Donald Trump. While everyone is breathlessly speculating about what Clinton is hiding in her records, you’d think the press would be equally curious about why a 70-year-old billionaire’s doctor is a cartoon character who wrote the most ridiculous letter attesting to a presidential candidate’s fitness in American history. Does he not have a real doctor? Will the hysteria this past weekend force the media to ask that question at long last? It’s actually much more suspicious than Clinton’s mundane fainting spell and bout with pneumonia.