WEST LAKE, IOWA — Just days after making national headlines in the second televised Republican debate of the 2016 presidential election season, Carly Fiorina is back on the campaign trail and grasping at even bigger headlines. During last week’s debate, Fiorina made a splash by not only confronting Donald Trump for his comments about her looks, but also by daring Hillary Clinton and other Democrats to watch the “sting” videos released by a right-wing, anti-abortion group against Planned Parenthood while citing a scene that many in the media have said simply does not exist in any of the tapes released. While many of Fiorina’s detractors have said her statements about the sting videos show a pattern of deceit and exaggeration — such as her touting of her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard which is flawed at best — the candidate herself seems to have shrugged off any criticism of her alleged fibbing and is now telling a story on the campaign trail that paints her in an even more extraordinary light.
“You know, people have been wondering if I can handle the challenges of being president,” Fiorina told the assembled crowd at one of her campaign stops in West Lake, Iowa on Monday, “and I just want to tell you — of course I can. Because if I can scale Mt. Everest on the very same day I cured cancer — which is all completely true, rest assured — then I can handle this President thing.” Fiorina then regaled her audience and reporters with the details, at various points waving pictures rapidly in front of the cameras and the audience, but never pausing long enough for anyone to see any details from the pictures.
Fiorina said it was one day in 1994 that she woke up in her home and decided she “needed to do something amazing that day.” It was then that she says she called her travel agent and had him book her immediate passage to Kathmandu and then on to Lukla, where she could start from Everest base camp and begin the trek up the mountain. Surprisingly, Fiorina said she made the climb by herself, claiming she “needed to prove to the world that Carly Fiorina can literally do anything she wants, and live to tell you the tale later.”
According to Ms. Fiorina she also made record time climbing the mountain, and along the way she made an incredible discovery. “There I was,” Fiorina said, winding my up Mt. Everest at a really brisk pace — I really don’t see what all the fuss is about climbing it — when all of a sudden I had this incredible idea hit me,” and that’s when she says she cured cancer. “It just so simple, once I took two minutes to focus my enormous brain power on the problem of cancer. Rest assured, I cured cancer that same day I scaled Mt. Everest.”
“It just so simple to me, I took this one thing, did another thing to that first thing, shook it all up in a thermos I’d brought along for the trip, and lo and behold — no more cancer,” Fiorina said. When reporters later asked her for any notes, research or proof of her having cured cancer, she told them, “I won’t be answering any gotcha questions about this. Rest assured I scaled Mt. Everest. Rest assured I cured cancer. You don’t need to see proof or evidence of anything as long as you rest assured.”
According to aides close to Fiorina, she has plans to reveal more and more extraordinary things about her past as the campaign winds on. “Some of it,” one staffer told us, “is literally incredible. Okay, most of it is. Alright, well, all of it is downright unbelievable in the most literal sense of the word, but we’re the party of Benghazi and Climate Hoaxes, luckily, so no need for us to worry about what happens if her stories are proven false; our voters will blame the media, not her,” the staffer told us.
“I haven’t even scratched the surface of my truly amazing life and past experiences,” Fiorina said as the rally came to its conclusion and she promised reporters she’d “blow their faces off” with stories such as the time she “rescued a princess from a space station” or when she traveled back in time with a wild-eyed scientist she used to hang out with and they helped her parents fall in love so they could get married and conceive her.
Fiorina currently places second in most polls of GOP voters, behind billionaire Donald Trump.
