Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not as tough as she wants the world to believe. When it comes to former President Trump, she trembles with fear remembering the time he beat her in a landslide during the 2016 election.
A new book details just how terrified Clinton was of Trump.
Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign staffers were so paranoid they thought the Russians would poison her through a handshake with Trump during the third debate.
Titled Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by the New York Times, Clinton believed that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, planning a secret plot to poison her via a handshake.
“Democrats found themselves almost perpetually disoriented by autumn. During preparations for the third debate, Clinton’s team was disrupted by a warning from the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who said he had been told that Russians might try to poison Clinton through a handshake with Trump, to inflict a dramatic health episode during the debate,” author Maggie Haberman wrote.
The alleged threat came from Richard Blum, the wealthy husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, claiming that the Russians wanted Clinton poisoned so that it would “inflict a dramatic health episode during the debate.”
Although Clinton did not take the warning “seriously,” Ron Klain, now President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, “wondered how Trump would poison Clinton but not himself.”
“Her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, took the prospect seriously enough to check it out; the warning turned out to be mere speculation from a historian with no knowledge of Russian plans,” the book says.
To play it safe, Clinton and Trump did not exchange handshakes that night.
The debate came days after the DNC was hacked and WikiLeaks published emails that were taken from Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.