With own marital issues, Trump camp goes all in on Clinton infidelity charges
After Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Hillary Clinton has been unfaithful to her husband, the Republican nominee’s campaign team is charging full force into the Clinton family’s sordid past.
It’s a reversal from Trump’s own promise during Monday night’s presidential debate that he wouldn’t say anything “extremely rough” about Clinton and her family.
“I was going to say something...extremely rough to Hillary, to her family,” Trump said at Hofstra University, where the first debate was held. “And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.’”
But by the weekend, Trump and his supporters didn’t hesitate to slam the Clintons for their marital past.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- whose own "notorius" cheating scandal was on full display in the early 2000s during his divorce from his second wife -- went on two political talk shows Sunday to defend Trump’s recent charges against Clinton and her relationship with her husband.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper asked Giuliani whether it was “normal, stable behavior for a presidential nominee to launch an unsubstantiated attack,” referring to Trump’s Saturday night assertion that “I don’t even think she’s loyal to Bill.”
“Well, after -- after she called him a racist and misogynist, a xenophobic, I don’t know, schizophrenic, and I don’t know what else she called him at the end of that debate -- I think it’s fair,” Giuliani said of Trump’s behavior. “It’s fair game.”
Tapper pushed back: “Just to make stuff up, just to say wild accusations, Hillary Clinton is cheating on Bill, no proof of it whatsoever? Everything is fair game?”
Giuliani claimed that it was a “sarcastic remark.”
The comment pointed out “that Bill Clinton has, you know, quite a past, and Hillary Clinton has done quite a job on attacking the people who were victims of Bill Clinton,” he said.
The former New York mayor went on to say that “it isn’t the marriage” Trump attacked -- though the GOP nominee did blast it at his Saturday rally.
“It’s the way she goes on the attack and tries to hurt victims of sexual predations,” Giuliani said. “I am saying the problem with Hillary Clinton has nothing to do, as far as I’m concerned, with her marriage.”
Trump’s attack of Clinton’s fidelity, however, may prove dangerous for the New York real estate mogul, whose record is far from squeaky clean.
Trump has openly discussed his own tumultuous first marriage to Ivana Trump, which dissolved after he began a relationship with actress and model Marla Maples. Trump later married Maples, staying with her for six years before wedding his current wife, Melania.
Giuliani has faced his own share of scandal when it comes to marital infidelities. The former mayor, also on his third marriage, began a relationship with Judith Nathan (now his wife) in the early 2000s while he was still married to local television personality Donna Hanover.
In another Sunday morning interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Giuliani was also pressed on previous comments he had made about the Clinton marriage, when he had claimed last week that Clinton was “too stupid to be president” because she didn’t know what her husband was doing with Monica Lewinsky.
“What I meant was, after the long, long history of Bill Clinton, Gennifer Flowers, Juanita Broaddrick, I don’t know, 27 people making claims against him, including a settlement with one of them were it was obviously true, when she first heard about Monica Lewinksy, to pretend for five or six months that it was false-- “ Giuliani said, before an interruption by NBC News’ Chuck Todd.
“She was wrong to stand by her husband?” Todd asked.
“No, she was wrong to attack the victim,” Giuliani said.
When asked by Todd if he was “the right person to level this charge,” the Trump surrogate responded in the affirmative.
“I’m the right person to level this charge, because I’ve never made such a charge, and I’ve prosecuted people who’ve committed rape,” Giuliani said.
“But your past, you have your own infidelity charge,” Todd retorted.
Giuliani’s response: “Well, everybody does. And I’m a Roman Catholic, and I confess those things to my priest. But I’ve never ever attacked someone who’s been the victim.”
He went on to attack Todd’s line of questioning, saying “I think your bringing up my personal life really is kind of irrelevant to what Hillary Clinton did. She’s running for president, I’m not.”
Another Trump surrogate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, went on the defense for the GOP nominee in a Fox News Sunday interview.
When Fox’s Chris Wallace asked why his candidate was still talking about Clinton as an “enabler” to her husband and attacking her for being “married to the single greatest abuser of women in the history of politics,” Christie hit back that it was Clinton’s fault for opening the door to those charges.
“You saw Hillary Clinton on the debate stage talking about these very issues. And you saw Hillary Clinton about women,” he said. “And you saw Hillary Clinton on the debate stage essentially accuse Donald Trump of being a racist.”