Hillary Clinton has finally owned up to one of the most infamous moments of her 2016 campaign.
She said campaigning through pneumonia that year was a mistake, telling listeners on the debut of her new podcast on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, that her doctors had ordered her off the trail and she ignored them.
The former secretary of state said physicians diagnosed the pneumonia and told her to take five or six days of rest during the final stretch of the presidential race. She turned them down. “I can’t do that,” she recalled saying. “I kept going, which was a mistake.”
The decision caught up with her in public view. On Sept. 11, 2016, Clinton appeared to stagger and nearly faint as she left the memorial ceremony in New York, and security aides helped her into a van. Her campaign confirmed the pneumonia diagnosis afterward, said she had become overheated, and drew criticism for not disclosing the illness sooner.
A decade later, Clinton said critics at the time painted her as being on death’s door. She also conceded the obvious problem for her campaign: there was video of her struggling to reach the car so she could catch her breath.
A Nine-Day Absence in Texas
The conversation started with a different candidate’s health. Clinton and co-host Kara Swisher, a journalist, discussed James Talarico, the Texas Democratic Senate nominee, who spent nine days away from the campaign trail after saying he had the flu. A rumor spread online that he had been quietly admitted to a mental health facility in Ohio. The two said the claim was simple to knock down.
Clinton Hits Trump on Medical Reports
Swisher argued that President Donald Trump is in far worse shape than Clinton was in 2016. Clinton seized on the comparison. “This is from a guy who has never given us an honest medical report ever. Ever,” she said.
The White House dismissed the remarks. “It’s time for Hillary to move on,” spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News Digital.
A Podcast With Midterm Stakes
The pneumonia exchange came in “High Stakes,” a limited series Clinton and Swisher are running ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesdays through mid-November inside the feed for Swisher’s New York Magazine podcast, “On With Kara Swisher.” Under the deal with Vox Media, Clinton takes a split of the ad revenue the episodes generate, alongside Swisher.
James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems agreed in May to buy Vox Media’s podcast network, Vox.com and New York Magazine in a deal reported at about $300 million.
The debut, billed as the affordability episode, ranged across the cost of gas, groceries and health care, what Democrats should hammer on before November, and Senate races in Michigan and Maine. Clinton also reflected on her own history with political attacks, according to the episode description, and opened the show by telling Swisher she answers to nearly anything.
Clinton is not new to the format. She hosted “You and Me Both With Hillary Clinton,” which ran from 2020 to 2023. The idea for this series grew out of a long conversation the two women had at a gathering held for Clinton at media executive David Bradley’s Washington home in spring 2026. Swisher then recruited Clinton to fill in for her regular co-host, Scott Galloway, on an August 2026 episode of “Pivot,” and talked her into the midterm project after that.
In 2016, Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. political party. She won the national popular vote with nearly 66 million ballots and lost the Electoral College to Trump. Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said, “She and Kara are forces of nature, and have an undeniable chemistry as hosts.”