WASHINGTON—When Hillary Clinton shuffled and stumbled as she abruptly left the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero on Sunday, clearly ill, the telltale video was captured by a bystander, not a journalist.

Clinton’s aides hadn’t told the travelling press pool that she was leaving.

When Clinton was driven home that night, she was not accompanied by the group of reporters that traditionally follows a candidate from door to door.

Clinton’s aides hadn’t allowed them to come along.

In between, her campaign claimed she had merely “overheated.” Only eight hours after the incident, and 48 hours after she saw a doctor, did they admit what appears to be the truth: she has pneumonia.

All together, it was vintage Hillary Clinton. As she has for two decades, the Democratic presidential nominee chose maximum secrecy right up until maximum secrecy was no longer a viable option.

“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia,” David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter. “What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”

The cure, in part, is running against Donald Trump. Clinton’s Republican opponent is in several important ways more opaque than she is.

But her reflexive bunker mentality has been one of the biggest drags on her campaign. It led to, and prolonged, her biggest scandal, over her decision to set up a private email server. And it indisputably made her Sunday incident worse.

“Sheer stupidity,” said Kathleen Dolan, chair of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “This one is just a self-inflicted wound. And inexplicable.”

“People get pneumonia all the time. You say, ‘The Secretary was diagnosed with pneumonia, that may require her to change some of her schedule in the next week, just giving you a heads-up.’ That’s all they had to do. But they didn’t. And it was stupid,” Dolan said. “And now it’s just one more piece of evidence that, ‘See, she lies about everything.’ And she doesn’t lie about everything.”

Indeed, independent fact checks show Trump has been far more dishonest during the campaign than Clinton. Trump, unlike Clinton, has refused to release his tax returns. Trump, unlike Clinton, has refused to allow a full-time press pool at all. Trump, unlike Clinton, has blacklisted news outlets from his rallies.

But voters trust her almost as little as they trust him. In an ABC poll this week, 61 per cent of voters said Clinton was not trustworthy or honest compared to 64 per cent for Trump.

“The irony is, take the three sort of principals of this race: the ghost of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I have no doubt in my mind that Hillary Clinton’s probably the more virtuous, more honest human being than either of the two of them,” said Gil Troy, author The Age of Clinton. “If you were to do a kind of virtue X-ray, she would win. But everyone’s convinced that she’s the evil incarnate.”

Part of the issue might be sexism, said Troy, a McGill University professor. Part might be political talent: “Bill Clinton, who was much sloppier and got into much more elaborate messes, was much better at cauterizing the wounds.” But some, Troy said, is simply this: “She’s made her own bed.”

Clinton did not do a press conference for 274 days. She has not allowed any reporters to witness even brief moments of fundraisers at the homes of the rich. The FBI showed her to have made false and misleading statements about her emails.

In Monday tweets and television interviews, Democrats called on her to be more transparent. There were signs her campaign was listening. In interviews, a spokesman promised additional medical documents.

But it will take more than a few gestures to change a reputation forged more than two decades ago. Clinton was already being accused of excess secrecy in 1993, when the names of the people on her health care task force, which met behind closed doors, were kept private for months.

And it will take more than a few days to change the personality of a cautious lawyer whose views on disclosure have long been based on the premise that the media and unhinged right-wingers are out to get her.

As early as the 1990s, Clinton’s most paranoid opponents were accusing her of implausible crimes up to and including having associates murdered. They are still doing so. And in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s episode, conservative media figures were claiming with no evidence that she had a deathly neurological disorder.

“You really have to go back to the trauma, and I don’t use that word lightly, the trauma of the 1990s,” Troy said. “And the degree to which every one of their most personal, intimate feelings, actions, encounters were splayed all over the media. And in some ways it’s a logical response to that insanity.”

Even back then, though, there was evidence that her secrecy was hurting more than it was helping.

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In 1993, the Clintons faced questions over their involvement with a failed real estate company. Instead of disclosing documents some of Bill Clinton’s aides thought would end the Whitewater matter, the president accepted his wife’s advice to keep them private.

The saga eventually resulted in the appointment of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who discovered Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, which made Hillary Clinton even more guarded.

“This is just an endless feedback loop,” said Dolan. “We expect her to not be transparent, she’s not transparent, we expect her to not be transparent.”

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