Chelsea Clinton said she didn’t think Hillary Clinton made “conscious choice” to hide her pneumonia diagnosis from the public and her own daughter.
“I didn’t know she had pneumonia until she came over to my apartment. So I don’t think it was a conscious choice,” Chelsea Clinton said in a Cosmopolitan interview published Wednesday. “I mean, she didn’t even tell me. I think she just expected she would power through it as she has always powered through everything.”
The Democratic presidential candidate collapsed outside a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City a few weeks ago. Clinton was put into van by her staffers and taken to her daughter’s apartment rather than a hospital, and the public was kept in the dark about Clinton’s whereabouts for over an hour. The campaign first said the candidate overheated before finally admitting Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia days earlier.
Although Clinton’s daughter wished the candidate had listened to her doctor sooner and taken a couple of days off before the incident, she pointed to Clinton’s Monday debate performance as evidence that her mother is the picture of health.
“And I think it was clear last night that she is — you know, she certainly looks healthier at her age than I feel at 36 at this moment,” said the younger Clinton. “I loved her answer about stamina, and yes, I think when anyone has traveled to 112 countries and a million miles, and sat through 11 hours of congressional hearings all in one day, they can then kind of have that conversation with my mom. But until then, I think that she wins that argument any and every day.”
She also brushed off Donald Trump’s attacks against her mother, and said those attacks are a “distraction from his inability to talk about what’s actually at stake in this election and to offer concrete, comprehensive proposals.”
“And candidly, I don’t remember a time in my life when my parents and my family weren’t being attacked, and so it just sort of seems to be in that tradition, unfortunately,” she said.
