Donald Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton’s marriage took a turn for the truly bizarre Saturday night when he suggested she might have been unfaithful to her husband. Bizarre and off message, since his campaign has been going ever deeper into attacks on Clinton because of the reverse, blaming her for her husband’s long-ago infidelity. “You know, I think Donald Trump shows Americans every day how low a campaign he is running,” Clinton campaign adviser Joel Benenson said on MSNBC.
“I think there’s — there seems to be no limit to the shameless lows Donald Trump can go to in this campaign,” Benenson continued, “and we're not gonna address any of those things he does. He mocked a disabled reporter. He mocked her the other night for being ill when she had pneumonia.”
Translation: While we may not have actively handed Trump this particular piece of rope, we’re just going to sit back and watch him hang himself with it.
Prominent Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani was more on message on Sunday than Trump was on Saturday night. It’s just a creepy, vile message. Giuliani, a past adulterer out campaigning for a past adulterer, was confronted with that particular bit of hypocrisy by Chuck Todd (!) saying “You have your own infidelities, sir.” “Everybody does,” Giuliani responded, later explaining that some of us cheat on our wives and others lie or otherwise sin and it’s all infidelity.
When asked why, if all people commit sins, he felt that raising the issue of Mr. Clinton’s infidelity is fair game, he said: “I’m not attacking the Clintons. I’m attacking Hillary.”
He made clear that the decision to resurrect the issue of Mr. Clinton’s affairs — and Mrs. Clinton’s attacks on the credibility of women who made claims of sexual impropriety — is linked to her raising Mr. Trump’s treatment of a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, in the final moments of the debate.
“If she would like to stop attacking on things that happened 20 years ago, he’ll stop attacking things that happened 20 years ago,” Mr. Giuliani said.
He added, “I don’t know if it is a winning or losing strategy, but if you get attacked, you have to defend yourself.”
That’s the Trump campaign in a nutshell. We’re not attacking the person who did the thing, we’re attacking a person who was hurt by the thing, because that happens to be who we want to attack. We’re blindly lashing out because we’re losing and because we definitely can’t be challenged by a woman without going low and personal. We don't get that there’s a difference between something that happened 20 years ago that everyone already knows about and new information about something Donald Trump did 20 years ago and can be relied on to do again and again and again right now.
But that’s what happens when a narcissistic bully like Trump surrounds himself with people like himself—Giuliani, Roger Ailes, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich. They think as long as they’re attacking, they’re winning, and that the rest of the country will hate women as much as they do.
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