“They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect,” Clinton said in an interview with The New Times, published Saturday. “They were willing to take a risk on [former President Trump] — who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection — because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”
“Is there a double standard? One hundred percent times 100 percent,” Tracy Sefl, a Democratic consultant and Clinton surrogate, said at the time. “And God forbid if she coughs.”
In the interview with the Times, Clinton also went after members of her party for what she said was a long-term failure in not shoring up abortion rights. She argued that Democrats didn’t fully estimate the power of anti-abortion powers until most of them were “taken by surprise” with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which ended the federal right to abortion access.