Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Are Less Forthcoming Than Past Candidates

The reporters were summoned to a hotel conference room and told they had three hours to review 1,173 pages of the septuagenarian Republican presidential nominee’s medical history. Notebooks only. No pictures or photocopying. No Internet connections.

But nothing in the file folders was off-limits, and even the most mundane notes about earwax were included in a trove that offered a remarkable window into the GOP’s leader and his physical fitness to lead the nation. The only request was that the journalists not disclose the pseudonym the candidate used when he was checked into hospitals.

That was 2008, and the nominee was 71-year-old Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a cancer survivor and former prisoner of war who could have become the oldest person to assume the Presidency.

Eight years after that, the latest Republican nominee has offered merely a 175-word statement from his doctor, declaring Donald Trump, now age 70, “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the Presidency.” Never mind that the statement was light on details and written in just five minutes as Trump’s team waited in the limo downstairs. Trust them, Trump’s campaign said, in a campaign environment so deeply rooted in distrust that even the most flimsy rumors have gained traction in some corners of the Internet.

Such is the state of the 2016 campaign, when traditions such as voluntarily releasing detailed medical disclosures and tax returns are being scrapped. Neither Trump nor his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, age 68, have followed long-held practices for transparency. Both sides are relentless in pointing out transgressions from tradition for the rival, but some of the most basics of presidential candidate decorum have fallen away, such as routine access for journalists traveling with the candidates.

If elected, Clinton at age 69 would the second-oldest person to take office for the first time, behind Ronald Reagan. Trump would beat both; he would be 70 on Inauguration Day.

In recent days, Trump seemed eager to revisit one piece of the wall both campaigns have built around themselves. “I think that both candidates, Crooked Hillary and myself, should release detailed medical records. I have no problem in doing so! Hillary?” he tweeted Sunday evening.

But Clinton’s aides warned reporters not to hold their breath. They said the note from Clinton’s doctor already had more detail than the one Trump released.

While frustrating in the moment, the shift in what is acceptable—and what is not—has long-term implication for how much Americans think they should know about their future leaders. Voters are left to fill in the gaps, often with incorrect information amplified on social media from like-minded friends. And, in an era when basic institutions such as government are viscerally distrusted, the lack of openness will undermine confidence when one of those two wins in November.

Campaigns, after all, are merely a preview of how the victor will govern. At this moment, a paltry 16% of voters see Trump as trustworthy, besting Clinton’s meager 11%.

Neither party is doing itself favors in the eyes of history. Take, for instance, the persistent rumors about Clinton. Her physician last year released a letter declaring her “a healthy 67-year-old female whose current medical conditions include hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies.” Clinton at the time took blood thinners, medications to address a thyroid condition and has recovered from a concussion. She also had surgery in 2009 to repair a fractured elbow.

That hasn’t been enough for Clinton’s foes. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee urged his supporters on Facebook to consider if Clinton was wearing a heavy coat to hide “medical devices” that are supposedly keeping her alive. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson called Clinton “elderly” and said she should fork over her health records. Former George W. Bush political maven Karl Rove said Clinton had spent a month in the hospital after a 2012 fall at home. (She spent three days there.) Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that voters should “go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness’” and see what they find.

Voters who took Giuliani’s advice would quickly fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Her hypothetical ailments include seizures, Parkinson’s, aphasia and dysphasia, a stroke, heart disease and multiple sclerosis. And that’s just on the first page of search results on Google. Fake medical records even popped up online, claiming to show she suffers brain damage and is subject to blackouts.

Some die-hard Trump supporters clearly buy the outlandish theories, but the real point of the exercise is something else entirely. It’s another opportunity for the Republican nominee’s camp to criticize Clinton over secrecy by arguing that she is covering something up. It’s the same basic format as the arguments over her use of a private email server and allegations about donors to her family’s foundation.

And for the GOP nominee, it’s a roundabout way to argue that Clinton is somehow too weak to be President. “Look, what happens, she gives a short speech then she goes home, goes to sleep, she shows up two days later,” Trump told one crowd in Florida.

Clinton brushed off the conspiracy-minded attacks, telling late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to take her pulse to prove she’s still alive. “With every breath I take, it’s like a new lease on life,” she said last week.

But her summary of health records—similar to what Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, and what Mitt Romney did in 2012—doesn’t shut down those who think Clinton could die in office if elected. A Trump aide for the mid-Atlantic region told voters that the election is really between his boss and Clinton running mate Tim Kaine. “This woman is very, very sick, and they’re covering it up,” Virginia and Maryland Trump director John Jaggers said, according to the conservative Washington Examiner.

Trump, it’s worth noting, fares no better when it comes to transparency. The real estate mogul has proclaimed he is worth an estimated $10 billion but won’t release tax returns that would prove it. (Forbes, which tracks the richest Americans, estimates a better number would be a still impressive $4.5 billion.) Trump claims he is facing an IRS audit, and it would be unfair to release incomplete financial reports. (Clinton has released hers dating back to 1977, when husband Bill Clinton was running for Governor and then President, long before she ran for the Senate, President and served as Secretary of State.) Adding to the aura of secrecy around the media-savvy Trump, he has also instituted a blacklist of news organizations that he refuses to issue coverage credentials and has suggested he would make it easier for public figures like himself to sue journalists he finds unfair or question his claims.

Then, there’s the basic logistical question of whether reporters themselves should have access to the candidate. It was the topic of a widely shared New York Times column on Monday. It sagely noted: “Imagine if reporters had not been on Air Force One when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or on 9/11, when it became a flying, wayward bunker for President George W. Bush. There are moments when you want witnesses to history whose loyalties aren’t tied to the protagonist.”

Clinton and Kaine routinely jump on their planes, and the traveling press corps on another. Clinton aides, tired of questions about why it has been 268 days since the boss last held a press conference, say that the travel logistics are expected to change after Labor Day and routinely point out that Clinton has taken questions more than 300 times during that period; they include people like Kimmel and local talk radio in the sum. Trump has his own jetliner, Trump Force One, that he travels on, with reporters on a separate plane. Only Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, shares a plane with his reporters at this moment. If candidates can blow off reporters now, how will they act as President? Already, reporters are not allowed to hear what the candidates are telling donors behind private doors, further inspiring suspicion that they say one thing in public and another in private. Will they be hiking in Rock Creek Park, while the press who for decades has sent representatives to track their every move when they leave the White House complex, be left watching social media for a spotting?

Who sits where on what planes or in which vans, of course, is a minor issue, and one few beyond reporters and historians fret over. But a candidate’s health—physical and financial—and accessibility is something that would be part of the conversation in any other election year. It’s a far cry from just eight years ago, when voters learned that McCain was a two-pack-a-day smoker until 1980, had kidney stones and had recently switched medicine to keep his cholesterol in check. And remember those days spent speculating whether Obama had, in fact, quit smoking?

There’s plenty still of unknowns about these two candidates’ health, even after the summaries they have shared. And at a time neither is particularly trusted, it’s curious they don’t show some measure of transparency. After all, if they are to believed, neither one has anything to hide.