Trump dredges up Clinton sex scandal
Donald Trump and his allies are dredging up the past marital infidelities of Hillary Clinton’s husband – a questionable move that is bewildering even some of his staunchest supporters.
The Republican nominee and his surrogates, under pressure to boost his standing with female voters and respond to Hillary Clinton’s accusations that he is a misogynist, are turning to an attack that has been tried repeatedly by the Clintons’ foes.
On Thursday, Trump spoke of the Clintons’ “sordid” history and made a reference to Bill Clinton’s near-impeachment, which stemmed from his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
A campaign memo circulated the day before urged associates to mention Lewinsky and other women with whom Bill Clinton has been widely reported to have had affairs.
Trump supporter Newt Gingrich, who as House speaker led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton on perjury and obstruction charges, expressed dismay over the Trump campaign’s effort to revive the controversy.
“It’s totally the wrong direction to go,” Gingrich said. “He should not let them bait him into a swamp where they can revel in the mud.”
Nor does it speak to the broader question of where Trump would take a country.
“This stuff isn’t critical to the campaign or even relevant to the people we need to be winning,” said Carl Paladino, the hardcharging former New York gubernatorial nominee who is the Trump campaign’s co-chairman in that state.
Trump – whose own extramarital affair and resulting divorce were laid out in lurid detail by the circa 1990 New York tabloids – has said he has been mulling whether to bring up Bill Clinton’s affairs in the next presidential debate.
Meanwhile, in the talking points sent around Wednesday, there were suggestions to frame Hillary Clinton as complicit in smear campaigns against the women involved.
“Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers,” according to one of the talking points, which were first reported by CNN.
In a Thursday interview on The View, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said, “I’m not advising him to go there.”
“(But) it’s fair game to think about how Hillary Clinton treated those women after the fact. She called Monica Lewinsky a loony toon.”
Conway was referring to comments in a private conversation that Clinton had with her friend, political science professor Diane Blair, which Blair recorded in papers that were donated after her death to the University of Arkansas library.
Clinton campaign officials theorized that Trump’s latest gambit reflected his own impulses, rather than a calculation on the part of his campaign high command.
“We’re convinced that very few people on his campaign actually think this is a smart strategy,” said Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon.
“It’s another case of the candidate’s impulsive, erratic instincts becoming the strategy.”
This stuff isn’t critical to the campaign or even relevant to the people we need to be winning. — Carl Paladino