Twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton falls down a lot, but she keeps getting back up.
The former first lady and secretary of state attended a recent gala for the Friends of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve to accept a very prestigious honor, and she recalled how the state preserve near her New York home has both lifted her up in times of despair while also contributing to her downfall.
“I’ve slipped and fallen on trails in the winter, and, you know, I’ve sloshed through mud in the spring, and I’ve absolutely relished the summer and marveled at the fall,” Clinton said of her strolls through the roughly 1,500 acre park over the years. “And it’s personally a place I have found so refreshing and fulfilling.”
Clinton’s comments about falling in the snow drew hardy laughs from folks who attended the 2019 gala, many of them undoubtedly familiar with her bad habit of tripping herself up throughout her career in politics.
There was the report of then Secretary of State Clinton breaking an elbow in a fall in 2009, video of her stumbling into a plane in Yemen in 2011 and Clinton struggling with stairs during her second failed presidential campaign on multiple occasions.
There was also her infamous collapse during a 9/11 memorial event in 2016, as well as a double slip down a large flight of stairs in India last year.
Reports of Clinton’s fumbles first emerged in 2009, when she reportedly downed herself on the way to a meeting at the White House and fractured her elbow, requiring weeks of recuperation at home, CNN reported.
As Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton also got tripped up in Yemen two years later.
After climbing a flight of stairs to enter her plane to depart from Sana’a, Yemen in January 2011, Clinton waived goodbye then turned to trip at the threshold, launching herself forward into the cabin. A man standing nearby was unable to break her fall and she went down face first, though CBS News reported she wasn’t injured in the embarrassing ordeal.
During her 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton faced criticism for leaning on several men to climb a very small set of stairs while campaigning in Columbia, South Carolina, a sign many pointed to as evidence of bigger health problems, Breitbart reported.
Clinton verified those suspicions months later when she collapsed during a very public 9/11 memorial event, where staffers and Secret Service agents propped her up and quickly ushered the then 68-year-old to an awaiting van. Clinton reportedly headed to her daughter’s apartment in New York City, instead of the hospital, and blamed the scare on a cold.
The slip-up in India was also scary.
Clinton was participating in an “India Today Conclave” in March 2018 when she attempted to navigate a large flight of stairs without a guardrail, arm and arm with a male aide. After several steps, she slipped on her backside, prompting another man to help her up.
All three continued down and seconds later Clinton slipped a second time, though her companions kept her upright. Two steps from the bottom, the elderly stateswoman kicked off her sandals for the final stretch to safety.
At the New York gala on Saturday, Clinton managed to stay on her feet as she received the Friends of Rockefeller State Park Preserve’s inaugural John D. Rockefeller Jr. Park Preservation Award alongside former president Bill Clinton.
“We are very pleased that the recipient of this prestigious honor will be presented to President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton for their longstanding commitment to the environment and dedication to build a more sustainable future,” the group’s website read.
Clinton told those in attendance the park has meant a lot to her by providing a place where the two could go to lick their wounds, both physically and politically.
“After good times and not so good times, we would come out here to just walk and kind of get beyond and through the experiences we’ve had,” she said. “But in every time we’ve always come back to that feeling of joy and solace and beauty that is such a gift.”
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