Republicans zeroed in on former President Bill Clinton’s speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, calling his mere presence at the largely virtual gathering “hypocritical,” “tone-deaf,” and a “betrayal of #MeToo.”
On a night otherwise devoted to Joe Biden formally receiving the Democratic nomination for president on his third campaign to do so in 32 years, Clinton sought to reprise his old attack dog role with an address assailing President Trump as a failure. But just as it used him as a foil in its own attacks against his wife Hillary in 2016, the Trump campaign used the 42nd president as a cudgel with which to beat Biden on the 1994 crime bill, trade policy, and even the Tara Reade sexual assault allegations that dogged the Democratic nominee in the early primaries.
“President Trump has spent his presidency righting the wrongs of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden’s track record of failed policies,” said the Republican National Committee’s Steve Guest in a statement. “On trade, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton rammed through NAFTA which resulted in 850,000 American jobs lost. President Trump’s response: He scrapped NAFTA and signed into law the USMCA.”
“Clinton and Biden also passed the 1994 Crime Bill together which ‘many experts now associate with mass incarceration.’ Their bill also doubled imprisonment from 1994 to 2009 and instituted the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule,” said the RNC rapid response director. “President Trump signed the First Step Act which ‘righted the wrongs’ of Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill.”
The Trump-Pence campaign lambasted Democrats — “the folks who tried to torpedo the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over completely unproven, unsupported, politically motivated claims of sexual assault” — for giving a prominent speaking role to Clinton given the allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from an inappropriate relationship with a White House intern to accusations of sexual harassment and rape, that have followed him for years.
Trump frequently brought up these claims when running against Hillary, appearing with Bill Clinton accusers Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Paula Jones mere hours before a presidential debate. Trump has also faced similar accusations, which he has denied.
Even some Democrats, who had begun a reappraisal of Clinton’s record after the 2016 election, expressed discomfort before his speech. The Trump campaign circulated a list of prominent Democrats and liberal activists, including unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who have criticized the former president on these issues.
Multiple Republican strategists mentioned the photographs published Tuesday of a young woman on a trip with accused mass sex offender Jeffrey Epstein giving Clinton a neck and shoulder massage. “I can’t think of anything more tone-deaf,” said one. “It’s totally hypocritical.”
In a largely feel-good night in which the delegate roll was called, capped by an effusive speech by former second lady Jill Biden, Clinton, along with 2004 Democratic standard-bearer and former Secretary of State John Kerry, took some of the hardest swings at Trump of any prominent politician on the roster.
“Donald Trump pretends Russia didn’t attack our elections. And now, he does nothing about Russia putting a bounty on our troops,” Kerry said. “So he won’t defend our country. He doesn’t know how to defend our troops. The only person he’s interested in defending is himself.” The RNC shot back that Kerry and Biden were the “disastrous foreign policy duo.”
“Donald Trump says we’re leading the world. Well, we are the only major industrial economy to have its unemployment rate triple,” Clinton said in remarks reminiscent of his 1992 attacks on the Reagan-Bush years. “At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it’s a storm center.” But the speed with which the former president became the main focus of GOP responses, on a night where Jimmy Carter and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also had their moments in the spotlight, was very different from his 1990s prime.
Trump has had more difficulty this year simultaneously tying Biden to the Clintons and a “radical left” that would like Democrats to leave the centrist political brand associated with the Clintons behind. The Democratic convention has elevated both Bernie Sanders and Republican defectors in an attempt to assemble the largest possible coalition against Trump in the fall.
