Trump said of Hillary: "She's been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives"
After a primary campaign that saw him insult Carly Fiorina’s looks, threaten to expose (something) about Ted Cruz’s wife, and boast about the size of hispenis, Donald Trump promised voters that once he won the Republican nomination, he would tone things down. Weeks before his last remaining rivals dropped out of the race, Trump declared that when the time is right, “I will be so presidential you will be so bored.”
But now that the nomination is all but locked up, it’s become apparent that promises of a more stately, diplomatic Trump were grossly overstated.
Trump didn’t even make it a week as the presumptive Republican nominee before launching a series of decidedly unpresidential attacks on his likely general election opponent. At an Oregon rally on Friday, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of enabling her husband’s alleged sexual misconduct and then mistreating the women involved.
“She’s been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives,” Trump said. “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.” In a subsequent appearance on CNN, Trump called Bill Clinton “the biggest abuser of women, as a politician in the history of our country.”
Trump seems intent on making Bill Clinton’s sexual history — and Hillary Clinton’s responses to it — a campaign issue. Here’s a quick refresher on a few of the Clinton sex scandals that seem likely to be dredged up in the months to come:
Paula Jones
In May 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed a civil suit accusing Bill Clinton of “sexually harassing and assaulting” her three years earlier. According to the lawsuit, after inviting Jones into his hotel room, Clinton exposed himself and propositioned her with “unwanted sexual advances.” The search for evidence in the case led Jones’s legal team to discover the Monica Lewinsky affair that eventually resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.
Clinton denied the allegations, but eventually paid Jones $850,000 to drop the lawsuit. He never publicly apologized or admitted wrongdoing.
Gennifer Flowers
In the leadup to the 1992 New Hampshire primary, the supermarket tabloid The Star published a story about an Arkansas state employee and nightclub singer named Gennifer Flowers who said that she and Bill Clinton had a 12-year-long affair. During the ensuing media scrum, the Clintons publicly addressed Flowers’ claims in a highly publicized “60 Minutes” interview immediately following the Super Bowl. Bill Clinton vaguely acknowledged “wrongdoing,” but called Flowers’ allegation of a 12-year affair “false.” According to Carl Bernstein, Hillary Clinton took “aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit” Flowers.
In the midst of the Flowers scandal, Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to return home to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled prisoner. The late Christopher Hitchens sharply criticized Clinton for cynically using the execution as a distraction from negative publicity arising from the Flowers story.
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