Some in the national media are pushing back as Donald Trump dredges up controversies that have dogged the Clintons for decades.
Trump began the week with throwback attacks on his likely rival in the general election, Hillary Clinton, by tying her to her former president husband’s past sex scandals and a suicide mystery from 1993.
“A Republican primary’s, a Republican primary’s, a Republican primary,” said MSNBC host and former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough on Tuesday. “A general election, when you’re running for president of the United States, far different, far more complex. And Donald Trump, I’m flabbergasted that he thinks this is going to move him a step closer to the White House.”
Co-host Nicolle Wallace, a former communications aide to President George W. Bush, agreed. “Now the [voters] that are left to be convinced, to them, he needs to prove to them that he can get his head around complicated questions of commander-in-chiefdom,” she said. “And he’s not answering those questions with these attacks. He’s not doing himself any political good with the people who are still on the fence about him.”
Trump on Monday posted a video to his Instagram account that showed a photo of former president Bill Clinton smoking a cigar accompanied by audio of women who have accused him of either rape or sexual assault. The clip closed with the sound of Hillary Clinton laughing and text that said, “Here we go again?”
The implication is that Hillary Clinton was in some way responsible for her husband’s alleged attacks or that she enabled them.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump pointed to Vince Foster, a former aide to Bill Clinton, whose death was officially ruled as a suicide but still remains the subject of conspiracies that say he was murdered. Trump called Foster’s death “very fishy.”
Heading into the general election, the national media have repeatedly framed the race as a matchup that will boil down to Trump’s attacks and Clinton’s response.
The Post called Trump’s allusions an attempt at “reviving some of the ugliest political chapters of the 1990s with escalating personal attacks on Bill Clinton’s character.”
A blog post at MSNBC called Trump’s new campaign assaults “nonsense.”
During an interview Monday night on Fox News, anchor Bill O’Reilly told Trump, “I’m not sure this is a good thing to do that. … You know that it makes the country look bad abroad. That’s what worries me.”
Last week, Trump bluntly referred to “rape” accusations that Bill Clinton has faced.
Bloomberg Politics commentator John Heilemann said such talk wouldn’t “help him with women or … help him with very many voters that aren’t already in his column.”
