“Hillary is hitting me with tremendous commercials, some of it said in entertainment, somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie o’donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree she deserves it, and nobody feels sorry for her. I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice, but she spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads on me, many of which are absolutely untrue.”
So has his team:
Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, on Tuesday morning said that Trump displayed “great temperament and restraint” by choosing not to mention Bill Clinton’s sex scandals during the debate.
During an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Conway said that Hillary Clinton sometimes looked “glib” while Trump was speaking during the debate before pivoting to Trump’s decision not to bring up Bill Clinton.
“I have to say, certainly as a woman, I appreciated the restraint at the end — I’m not sure I would have been able to exercise it myself — but restraint is a virtue, and it’s a presidential virtue,” Conway said. “To tell Hillary Clinton, after she accused him of being terrible with women, to tell Hillary Clinton, ‘I was prepared to go rough tonight and I’m not going to do it because your husband and your daughter are here,’ that is going to grow in importance over the next couple of days as the moment of great temperament and restraint.”
And this:
“The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky,” Giuliani said. “And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”
So it seems obvious to me that Trump is going there – of course, he hasn’t said it to her face yet, but he is laying the ground work to get quite explicit with this line of attack.
It makes perfect sense if you understand who Trump is. He has no problem with Bill Clinton’s infidelity, just like he has zero problem with his own infidelity. Nope, in Trump’s world a man cheating is the woman’s fault. Period.
It’s her fault for letting herself go – for gaining weight, for not being hot enough, for aging
It’s her fault for not meeting his needs – for not supporting and adoring him, as well as sexually
It’s her fault for being “frigid” or… a lesbian (remember that one?)
It’s her fault because he deserves the newest model on the market – and she should understand this!
If that’s the way you view infidelity then, of course, Bill’s cheating isn’t really his fault – it’s Hillary’s. How else could Trump, a serial adulterer, not see his own adultery as wrong? How else could Trump, a man who’s done exactly what Bill Clinton did, consider using infidelity as a weapon against Hillary – the person who was cheated on? Easy. In Trump’s view, it’s not the man’s fault.
So yeah, this issue is going to take center stage. The only question is if Trump has the nerve to say it to Hillary’s face. I’m not sure of that – however, it’s obviously bouncing around in his head, which greatly increases the odds of it spewing out of his mouth during one of the next debates. The man has no impulse control. Back him into a corner and brace yourself for all sorts of crazy. Add to that that Trump seems to think that this issue is his secret weapon – it’s why he keeps teasing it. WTH? Only in Trump world is the person who was cheated on in the the wrong – that it was their fault. Newsflash: Most people don’t feel this way.
I’m 100% certain Hillary has prepared for this line of attack – and I’m certain her response will be pitch perfect. In fact, having a woman candidate running against Trump is pure perfection. He knows how to deal with men (and does so quite effectively). He believes that a man has the right to share a debate stage with him – not so for a woman. Go back and look at the GOP primary debates. When was the one time Trump took a big hit? Yep, it came when he went after Carly Fiorina personally.