AP Photo Fourth Estate Why We’re Right to Speculate About Trump and Clinton’s Health

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Compared to the youthful Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are walking husks, spotted by age and raked by the hard life dealt to those who, after gathering power, only want to gather more. Trump, 70, looks like an elderly Clydesdale, right down to the mane and the wattles. Clinton, who will turn 69 in October and looks to wear less make-up than Trump, has insisted on a shade of blonde that’s contradicted by all the usual signs of aging—wrinkles, sagging skin, double chin, lost muscle mass, dark circles, et al.

So it’s no surprise that speculations about the physical and mental firmity of these two senior citizens has been raised as a campaign issue. If Trump and Clinton were in the running to take over a troubled Fortune 500 company or assume the presidency of a major university, critics would rightly point out that having collected their three score and ten, both were past their prime and neither were likely to reclaim it in the next four years. It’s not that all the coverage has been kosher. At the risk of being accused of false equivalence, both candidates have gotten bum treatment by the press and in public forums. This month, TV host Dr. Drew Pinsky speculated wildly about Clinton’s health on a Los Angeles radio talk show and questioned the care she was getting, based on the 2015 health summary produced by her physician. Clinton has also been the target of now-discredited faked medical records, much trafficked on the Internet, purporting to show that she suffers from seizures and dementia. Madame Secretary has also been smeared as wretchedly ill by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Trump, who have questioned her “stamina” to do the job of president. “Go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness’ and take a look at the videos for yourself,” Giuliani recently said to Fox News Sunday viewers, when what he should have done is direct viewers to credible sources.


Trump, who did himself no favor by distributing the comic riff masquerading as a health care statement by his physician, has been the subject of critical scrutiny, too. It’s not every political candidate who gets diagnosed on a Sunday morning TV show as a “psychopath,” as Trump was last weekend by Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe. “I mean, he meets the clinical definition, OK?” Plouffe told Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press. Joining the diagnosis of Trump as a mental defective worthy of a stay at the funny farm are New York Times columnist David Brooks, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, broadcaster Keith Olbermann and a former dean of Harvard Medical School.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, voters and journalists have every right—almost a duty!—to reject the official health summaries provided by candidates and to speculate, especially when the candidates are as old as Trump and Clinton. (Medical doctors and psychiatrists, however, operate under different, professional standards and are in general ethics-bound to keep their lips zipped, especially about mental health. See this commentary on the “Goldwater Rule.”) If elected, Trump will be the oldest president in U.S. history, and Clinton will be second oldest if she wins. Age is an excellent marker for the ability to do such a job, and with age come illness and disability. If older people insist on running for high office like the presidency, which is known for taxing even the young, it seems like a reasonable trade-off to allow voters and journalists greater latitude in their scrutiny of the past-their-prime candidates.

Prejudice against older people running for the White House is an American tradition, one paired with a similar prejudice against exceedingly young people seeking the office. This prejudice against young presidential candidates is easily demonstrated. The median age of a new president is about 54.5 years, and the youngest man elected president, of course, was John F. Kennedy, at 43 years and 7 months. For young people who seek the presidency, the relevant question is, do you have enough experience? For older people it is, are you up to the job or will you fail because of your age?

Basic stories about a candidate’s health are almost always political smears, making them a subgenre of the general practice of politics, which abounds with smears. But most political smears—and the attacks against Trump and Clinton are just that—usually have some foundation in fact, otherwise they wouldn’t land in the public sphere with such force. The Trump stories have legs because Trump acts … crazy. The Clinton smears draw their power from her recent medical history, especially that 2012 fall that resulted in a concussion, and because she is showing her years.

To rule out all discussion, inquiries or speculations about Trump and Clinton’s health no matter how wacko, then, would be a disservice to voters. A good candidate can stand up to and defeat smears. In fact, the ability to project the sort of leadership and counterattack that snuffs out smears should be a prerequisite for the office of presidency. And it’s not like the candidates have to do this all by themselves. The press loyally observes its duty to police smears and has distinguished itself this cycle. (The “press” has also been spreading the smears, but the price you pay for a First Amendment is a bunch of noise to go along with the signal.) See this piece by PolitiFact about the health of the two candidates and this one by Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler on Trump’s claim that Clinton has no stamina. Here’s Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald taking down Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity for dissembling about Clinton’s health. And Snopes refuted the Hillary “seizure” video.

If football and baseball players are required to take rigorous physical exams in order to get a contract, maybe we should apply a similar standard to presidential candidates as POLITICO’s Dan Diamond wisely suggested this week. Verifiable medical reports on the candidates produced by independent physicians would limit the field for fanciful accusations.

Once that’s accomplished, the candidates and their campaign can return to their regular smears against each other.

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Who’s afraid of being accused of false equivalency? Not me. That’s because in the “He said, she said,” debate, I’m usually the “she said” guy, saying something the “he saiders” want to suppress. Taunt me with email to [email protected]. My email alerts have lumbago, my Twitter feed has polio, and RSS feed is currently dead and in seek of resurrection.