Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., said Tuesday that Hillary Clinton needs to do a better job of reporting her health status to voters.
“I think both of them need to be held to the same standard,” Dingell said on CNN of Clinton and Donald Trump. “And if she sneezes, she needs to tell us whether it is a sneeze or an allergy or what everything is going forward.”
Dingell also complained that people should be at least as outraged at Trump for his failure to release his tax returns.
“So yes, she’s got to just understand that everybody’s micromanaging what her health is, but I also want to know why we are not screaming as loud about Donald Trump tax returns,” she said.
Clinton seemed to admit her lapse in telling people how sick she was. She was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, but that only became clear after Clinton became dehydrated in New York City on Sunday and had to be rushed from a 9/11 ceremony.
Some Democrats have said Clinton is being held to a double standard because she is a woman, and Dingell seemed to support that by saying women have always had to “power through” their health problems.
“I’m a woman of her generation, a few years younger, and I am telling you that for my entire career you power through,” said Dingell, who is 62. “If I was sick, I mean I had major surgery and was back at work in three or four days because that’s just what you do.”
Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who was also being interviewed on CNN, said she expects Trump to release more information about his health, and said Clinton’s real problem is her lack of transparency.
“But going back to Hillary Clinton, what has happened is through the years, there has been this pattern … kind of a deceptive attitude of hiding things whether it is the Clinton Foundation, or the emails and what transpired there, or the Benghazi situation,” Blackburn said. “So people come to that lens of viewing her with the element of distrust.”
