Hillary Clinton's latest attempt to keep her health issues away from the public is just the latest in a long line of such efforts that have backfired on her, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said Monday.
"It isn't about the health, it's about the stealth," Dowd told Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, echoing similar comments by Democratic strategist David Axelrod.
"The health issue is a perfect microcosm of why she has problems," Dowd said on "The Kelly File." "I started covering her in '92 when she first came on the scene. . . . This is the exact same pattern she followed every time."
Comparing Clinton to Republican Donald Trump's call for a border wall, Dowd said Clinton "has her wall up defensiveness and secretiveness" that tries to keep the press from knowing anything.
"And each time it gets worse because that spirals into a snowball," she said. "And the press and her foes get into a frenzy, and the whole thing is so much worse when it starts out relatively mundane."
Dowd, promoting her new book "The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics," said Trump, the GOP nominee, has lost her own brother and sister with some of the things he has said during the campaign.
An essay by her brother in the book explains why he intended to vote for Trump.
"It gave me an interesting insight into what [House Speaker] Paul Ryan and [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell must be thinking but can't say," she said. "You know, how your kind of average country club guy like my brother is twisting and turning a little bit about voting for Trump because he really wants Hillary to be defeated."
But after Trumps comments about Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, he asked if he could kill the essay.
"I said 'No, it's already gone to print,'" she told him. "You know how it is with Trump, every day and every hour they change their mind about whether they can support him."
Her sister was on the Trump bandwagon until he retweeted the unattractive picture of Heidi Cruz, wife of then-Trump challenger Ted Cruz.
"I said, you lost my sister's vote. . . . And he paused and he said, are you serious? And I said yes. Well, he said, it wasn't that unattractive of a picture. And I said yes it was, why don't you just apologize for it? And he apologized for it."