Donald Trump has launched a bitter broadside against Hillary Clinton depicting her as an “enabler” of Bill Clinton’s past infidelities – the latest nasty and deeply personal turn in the U.S. presidential campaign.
Trump, who has all but locked up the Republican nomination, made the bizarre allegation while on the stump this weekend in an apparent bid to undercut his Democratic rival’s appeal to women voters.
“Hillary hurt many women – the women that he abused,” Trump told a rally in Spokane, Washington, late Saturday – reiterating past criticism of Clinton over her handling of the former president’s affairs.
“And just remember this, she was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.
“Some of those women were destroyed not by him, but by the way that Hillary Clinton treated them after everything went down.” The likely Republican nominee charged that Bill Clinton had “abused women more than any man that we know of in the history of politics.”
“Bill Clinton was the worst in history, and I have to listen to her talking about it?” he thundered.
Trump has accused Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate in November’s presidential election, of using her gender to her political advantage – playing the “woman’s card” – and says she would not be seen as a qualified candidate if not for her sex.
His remarks recalled one of the most contentious eras in American politics, when the nation was simultaneously riveted and revolted by the Monika Lewinsky sex scandal. Clinton at first denied, but later acknowledged an affair with the White House intern, a scandal that ultimately led to his impeachment and deepened the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.