Nobody in American politics holds a grudge quite like Hillary Clinton.
Ten years later, the 2016 loss still eats at her, and podcasts give her plenty of airtime to stew.
But her newest shot at Donald Trump came packaged with one admission she probably wishes she’d kept to herself.
Hillary Finally Comes Clean About the Ground Zero Stumble
Anybody who followed the 2016 race remembers the footage. Clinton, then the Democrat nominee, slipped away early from the September 11 memorial ceremony in lower Manhattan, and a bystander’s phone caught her legs buckling while her security detail hoisted her into a waiting van.
Her campaign told reporters she “felt overheated.”
And then the real story leaked out in pieces. Later that day, Dr Lisa Bardack, Clinton’s personal physician, disclosed that she had diagnosed the candidate with pneumonia two days before the ceremony. Bardack’s statement left no doubt about the medical advice: “She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule.”
Clinton did not rest. She kept her weekend fundraisers and showed up at Ground Zero anyway.
A decade later, she finally admits that was a bad call.
Clinton sat down with tech journalist Kara Swisher on the pair’s new joint podcast and walked through the whole ordeal. Here’s how she told it:
“They tested me and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve got pneumonia. You need to take like five or six days off.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ And my doctor said, ‘Well, that’s what you should do.’ And I thought, ‘Well, yeah, that’s what I should do.’ But I’m campaigning and I have to show up on 9/11 because it means a lot to me since, as you know, I was a senator [during the attacks]. So, I kept going, which was a mistake,” Clinton said.
Fair enough. Most Americans have dragged themselves to work sick at some point because they couldn’t stand to miss something that mattered. And few people would fault a woman who represented New York in the US Senate on September 11, 2001, for wanting to stand with those families.
But the humble moment lasted about as long as a commercial break.
Swisher Teed It Up and Clinton Swung Straight at Trump
The whole exchange kicked off with James Talarico, the Texas Democrat Senate nominee who vanished from the campaign trail for nine days after announcing he had the flu. His absence set off a pile of online chatter, including one viral rumor about his whereabouts that the Associated Press later knocked down.
Clinton saw a reflection of 2016 in his story. She grumbled that critics back then made her out to be “on death’s door.”
Swisher went further. She claimed President Trump was “quantumly sicker” than Clinton had ever been, added that “they hide it,” and handed Clinton the floor.
Clinton grabbed it with both hands. “They did have the video of me struggling to get to the car to be able to, you know, take some breaths and recover myself. From my perspective, it worked because it was just papering social media, papering traditional media. ‘I was dying. I was lying about my health.’ This is from a guy who has never given us an honest medical report ever. Ever.”
Look closely at what she actually regrets. Clinton calls the decision to attend the ceremony a “mistake.” She never says the same about keeping the diagnosis quiet for two days while reporters chased her around New York.
In her telling, the trouble came from the camera. The video “worked” for her opponents, and that’s the part that still stings.
And that tells folks just about everything about how Democrats think about health questions. Brian Fallon, her campaign press secretary at the time, conceded back in 2016 that leaving the public in the dark for roughly 90 minutes after the stumble was a mistake. Clinton still hasn’t quite gotten there.
The White House Answered With the Name Democrats Hate Hearing
White House spokesman Davis Ingle didn’t let the jab slide.
“President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration, when Democrats and the legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people,” Ingle told Fox News Digital. “President Trump is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises, and he remains in excellent health. Meanwhile, Crooked Hillary Clinton is still whining about her spectacular 2016 election defeat. It’s time for Hillary to move on.”
Ingle went right for the soft spot. Clinton’s 2016 episode looks like a dress rehearsal next to what came later.
In February 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur described Biden in his report as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Democrats lined up to attack Hur rather than deal with what he wrote. White House aides and cabinet officials kept insisting Biden was sharp and fully in command behind closed doors.
Then the June 2024 debate blew the act apart in front of tens of millions of viewers. That night laid bare a decline the people closest to Biden had watched, managed, and explained away for years.
And good luck finding Clinton demanding honest medical reports from the Biden White House while all that was going on. She now demands a standard from Trump that her party never bothered to meet.
Swisher’s “quantumly sicker” crack deserves a word too. She cited no doctor, no record, and no diagnosis. Trump keeps a travel and speaking schedule that would wear out men decades younger, and the White House says he remains in excellent health.
Expect This Playbook Every Time a Democrat Gets Sick
Clinton and Swisher called the Talarico rumor easily disproven, and on that narrow point the record backs them up. The AP reviewed images showing Talarico at home in Austin during the stretch the rumor covered.
But notice how quickly the talk turned. A false rumor about one Democrat became a launching pad for an unsupported claim about a Republican President, delivered with a straight face by two people complaining about unsupported claims.
Democrats brand questions about their candidates’ health as smears. Then they treat their own speculation about Trump’s health as brave truth-telling. Same podcast, same breath.
And the next time a Democrat heading into 2028 coughs on camera or drops off the trail for a week, expect the exact same routine. Anyone who asks gets the “conspiracy theorist” label, while the same voices keep guessing out loud about Trump’s medical chart.
There’s a bigger pattern underneath all of this, and Clinton almost stumbled into it herself. Her party has spent the better part of a decade treating voters like they can’t handle the truth about the people asking for their votes, whether it was a pneumonia diagnosis in 2016 or a President’s fading memory in 2024.
And Clinton shows no sign of letting go of 2016. Ingle told her to move on. She keeps circling back to the same race, the same grievances, and the same villain, now with a podcast microphone in front of her.
Voters already settled the matter in 2016, and they settled it louder in 2024 when they sent Trump back to the White House.
Clinton can call her trip to Ground Zero a mistake. Her party’s bigger one was betting Americans would never notice what it kept hiding.
Sources: Fox News, “Hillary Clinton concedes infamous 9/11 near-fainting episode in 2016 was a ‘mistake’ on her part”; CBS News, “Hillary Clinton diagnosed with pneumonia ahead of 9/11 ceremony, doctor says” (2016); Associated Press via the Recorder, reporting on the Clinton campaign’s handling of the 2016 episode; City AM, statement from Dr Lisa Bardack (2016); Associated Press via KBTX, “FACT FOCUS: Posts falsely claim Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was at a mental facility”; The Texas Tribune, “James Talarico returns to campaign trail at ACL festival after illness”; US Department of Justice, Report of Special Counsel Robert K Hur (February 2024)
