Donald Trump recently offered the New York Times a blueprint of his planned attacks against Hillary Clinton for the general election. Surprise, surprise! Aside from the current Republican obsessions of Benghazi and eGhazi, Trump is mostly set to focus on stuff Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. We’re talking here about a set of attacks so predictable that, in reporting them, the Times also explained why they were likely to fail. Take Bill’s past affairs:
Why Trump Would Attack: Mr. Trump has already used Mr. Clinton’s history of infidelity against Mrs. Clinton to repel criticism that Mr. Trump is sexist. He claims that Mrs. Clinton enabled her husband by staying with him despite the affairs and protected him by trying to blame the women. “We have to destroy her story,” Mrs. Clinton said of one woman, according to the memoir of Mr. Clinton’s former adviser George Stephanopoulos.
Why It Might Fail: Even some of Mrs. Clinton’s harshest critics think that she handled her marital problems with grace, and the opening of old wounds could engender sympathy for her. This line of attack also opens up Mr. Trump, who has been married three times, to questions about his philandering.
Attacking a woman because her husband cheated on her decades ago, when there can be nothing new in her response to the information because it was all fully aired at the time, seems like a self-evidently stupid strategy … but it’s not like Trump is the only Republican who would take this approach. They really think this stuff has some power, because they think everyone blames women for everything, just like they do.
The substance of Trump’s attacks over old stuff isn’t the only laughable thing here. His camp is still pushing back against reports that, in the 1990s, Trump posed as his own publicist under an assumed name. They’re complaining that it was a long time ago and shouldn’t be relevant to this campaign—unlike Bill Clinton’s affairs, apparently.
One of Trump’s top aides told Jake Tapper that “I don’t even know the relevance of this, frankly, other than it’s 25 years old ... Why the media is spending so much time going back 25 years old to talk about a People magazine interview – article – tape that may or may not be Trump, totally irrelevant.” But as Steve Benen points out, Trump “lied about this a few days ago, not 25 years ago. When presidential candidates get caught lying in the middle of a campaign season, it’s ‘relevant.’”
And this is not likely to be the last time Trump gets caught lying in the middle of this campaign—though it may be the oddest and most eye-catchingly funny.