“Below Par”: Donald Trump’s Ardent Courtship Of Bill And Hillary Clinton
Nobody should be surprised that the Washington press corps, perennially obsessed with Bill Clinton’s real and imagined private life, would seize upon any chance to revisit that favorite topic, especially if that means mimicking Donald Trump. They’ve never quite gotten over the departure in disgrace of their favorite pornographer, the former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
What the political press mostly fails to explore is the overall absurdity of Trump’s new Bill-bashing gambit. They may wonder aloud how a misogynist bully can accuse anyone else of “sexism” or “abusing women,” but if Trump got the same treatment as Clinton, the media would remind us every day of his vile attacks on Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, his distasteful remarks about his suppressed desire to “date” his daughter Ivanka, and his alleged battering and marital rape of his former wife Ivana.
Like so much of Trump’s loud talk, his disparaging remarks about Bill and Hillary Clinton have scant credibility, at least to anyone who knows anything about him. Whatever he claims to think of them now, he has spent years sucking up to the Clintons in the most abject way. His one-sided courtship of the former First Family goes well beyond Trump’s ridiculous insistence that they attend his wedding to his third wife in Florida.
Although he now claims to deplore Bill Clinton’s misbehavior, Trump awarded the former president a free membership at his Trump National Golf Club, just a few miles from the Clinton home in Westchester County. Still a member to this day, Clinton has long enjoyed all kinds of special privileges at the club, where he maintains a locker in a special VIP section near those of former Yankees manager Joe Torre and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Not only has Trump boasted repeatedly about Clinton’s membership and displayed pictures of them together, but on Clinton’s 65th birthday a few years ago, he cleared the course so that the Clintons, including Chelsea and her husband, could play a leisurely foursome there.
Gullible wing-nuts who admire Trump and hate Clinton won’t like hearing any of these facts, of course. But the impeccably far-right Washington Free Beacon told the story not so long ago, illustrating it with fun photos. (Evidently the Beacon story was designed as a “racist” smear of Clinton, but that fizzled.)
This silly episode illustrates once more why only the very dimmest Americans believe that Trump “tells it like it is” and “says what he really thinks.”
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 2, 2015
“Wilier Than Trump Could Ever Dream Of Being”: Trump Should Think Twice About Picking On Bill Clinton
Donald Trump might be picking the wrong schoolyard fight.
His modus operandi is to bully. And it’s proved to be an ideal strategy for tying his Republican rivals in knots. But now he’s trying it on someone whose powers of political legerdemain are legendary: Bill Clinton.
The 69-year-old former president is wilier than Trump could ever dream of being. This is the man who hung the 1995-96 government shutdown around the neck of his chief political adversary, House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A formidable huckster in his own right, Gingrich was the It Boy of conservatism and the leader of an ascendant “Republican Revolution,” but after losing his budget showdown with Clinton, his career went into permanent eclipse.
Gingrich’s oafish understudies then mounted an ill-advised impeachment campaign against Clinton, which only burnished the president’s credentials as a victim of partisan fanaticism.
Trump, by contrast, is a cad whose vulgarity and brutishness are given cover by the fact that those very qualities are cheered by a large portion of the Republican base. He’s making the P.T. Barnum bet on the Republican electorate, and so far it’s paying off.
In recent days, Trump has pounced on Hillary Clinton’s husband, in particular his record of cheating, as a new stratagem to upend her campaign. On Twitter, he asserted: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”
But this only underscores another difference between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: The former president’s record on so-called women’s issues is stellar. He appointed the first women to become U.S. attorney general and secretary of state, added Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and signed the Violence Against Women Act, along with other measures that benefited women.
That’s the lesson of the Clinton White House. Slick Willie was capable of being unfaithful to his wife — in ways that disgusted women and men everywhere — and yet he also acted with foresight and responsibility in formulating policies that women care deeply about. “Compartmentalizing” is the word pundits used to describe this seeming paradox. But in fact it’s a common enough trait in political figures: Their public service is distinct from their private lives.
It is highly doubtful that Trump has the same ability. His almost cartoonish narcissism results in everything becoming personal. Challenge him in the most tentative way and he’s your enemy. And if you happen to be a woman, get ready for the most juvenile of sexist taunts.
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly learned that lesson on live TV. During the first Republican presidential primary debate, she pressed Trump on comments he had made about women in the past, among other issues. He responded over the next several days with a peevish onslaught that culminated in a crude suggestion that Kelly had been menstruating.
Every savvy and ambitious woman in America knows that scenario. Tick off a powerful man and wait for the backlash. The more out-gunned the man is intellectually, the viler the putdown you can expect.
References to women’s menstrual cycles or their use of a toilet — all part of Trump’s charm offensive — are not the way to win female votes, Republican or Democratic. Women are more than half of the population and they vote in higher percentages than men. Our vote matters. And it’s not just the stereotypical issues that move women; we care about education, equal pay and health care policy.
If Trump hopes to pull himself out of the verbal gutter and address female voters, he’s going to have to start talking real policy. But that brings up a third key difference between him and the Clintons.
Bill and Hillary have long, long records of formulating, enacting and defending policies. They’re not records of unqualified success or popularity, to be sure. But there is not a policy area in American government in which they have not taken a leading role at the highest level.
Trump, when he has attempted even the roughest outline of a policy, has proved to be a charlatan. He’d like to claim that Hillary Clinton is using her gender to sell herself, but she doesn’t have to. Her chops dwarf those of anyone the Republican Party can stand against her. That is what she will run on.
If the GOP chooses Trump as the nominee, the general election will be a referendum on him — not on Hillary, as Republican strategists might wish it to be.
So let him tear into Bill and Hillary in any way he likes. The smart money, as always, is on the Clintons.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, December 30, 2015
“Donald Trump, The Candidate For The Ladies”: Trump Is Not Just Sexist, But ‘Spectacularly Sexist’
Donald Trump is ready to throw down with Hillary Clinton over the issue of sexism. Being a big fan of the ladies (at least until they hit their 40s), Trump is not going to sit back and take any criticism from Clinton on this subject:
Donald Trump on Sunday accused Hillary Clinton of unfairly trading on her gender while declaring Bill Clinton to be “fair game” as the former president hits the trail to campaign for his wife.
“She’s playing the woman’s card,” Trump said during an interview on Fox News, before turning his attention to Clinton’s husband, declaring him “fair game because his presidency was really considered to be very troubled because of all the things that she’s talking to me about.”
There are a number of things to unpack here. Is Clinton “playing the woman’s card”? Well, yes. In this campaign, much more so than when she ran in 2008, she has talked a lot about how it’s long overdue for a woman to be elected president. She has also stressed many issues that affect everyone but are particularly important to women, like family leave. And she hasn’t shown any reluctance to call out sexism when she sees it.
All of which seems perfectly legitimate to me, though you might feel differently. The truth is that for her entire time as a public figure over the last two-plus decades, Clinton has been the target of sexist venom that has no parallel in both its volume and intensity in our recent history. There are a number of ways one can react to it — ignore it, acknowledge it but pretend it doesn’t bother you, call attention to it — all of which she has done at one time or another. You can argue that no one should vote for her solely because she’s a woman, and I doubt she herself would disagree. But you can’t say it won’t be an issue if she’s the Democratic nominee.
And if Trump ends up being the Republican nominee, sexism will be a much bigger issue than it would be with any other GOP candidate. That’s because — let’s be honest here — Trump is not just sexist, but spectacularly sexist. He constantly comments on women’s appearance, treats women differently than men (you’ll remember how, during one of the debate shout-fests, he singled out Carly Fiorina: “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”) and is plainly horrified and repulsed by women’s bodily functions, whether it’s breastfeeding, menstruation or peeing. And oh yeah, he seems to have a creepy interest in his own daughter.
You can rest assured that if Trump and Clinton are the nominees, there will be multiple occasions on which Trump will say something unbelievably sexist about Clinton or someone else, Clinton will express her outrage, and it will be the topic of extended discussion in the media. Which will serve to reinforce what a big deal it would be to have our first woman president.
But what about Bill Clinton? If you look at what Trump has said in interviews and on Twitter, he’s arguing that not only shouldn’t Hillary Clinton talk about sexism, but Bill Clinton shouldn’t even campaign for her, given his past. The idea that Clinton shouldn’t talk about sexism because she stayed with her husband after he had an affair with a 20-something White House intern has been raised before, but it doesn’t make any more sense now than it ever has. It’s not as though she ever excused his behavior, and it’s hard to believe there are too many voters who abhor sexism and will vote against Hillary Clinton because of her husband’s personal failings.
When Bill Clinton campaigns for her, that’s not going to be what he talks about, and when he does get asked about it, he’ll surely dodge the question with little difficulty. And on the whole, Bill will be an effective surrogate for her. He’ll be able to remind everyone of the successes of his presidency, particularly on the economy, and while Hillary may not be able to claim credit for them, she can certainly argue that she’ll be following a similar approach that will produce similar results.
Yes, there will be questions about his post-presidential activities and what he’ll be doing if he becomes First Spouse. And there’s always the chance that in the heat of political battle he could make mistakes, as he did at certain points in 2008. But Bill Clinton remains extraordinarily popular — in fact, he’s almost certainly the most popular partisan political figure in America. In a national Bloomberg poll last month, 60 percent of Americans said they had a favorable opinion of him (well ahead of the much-improved 45 percent George W. Bush got).
You can argue that candidates’ gender shouldn’t matter at all, or that while it would be good to have a woman president, Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be that woman. But what you can’t say is that Donald Trump is the candidate to support if you want to strike a blow against the kind of sexism Hillary Clinton represents. The only person crazy enough to believe that is Donald Trump.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 28, 2015
“How Much Change Can The Right Take?”: Trump Is Getting Too Much Media Attention
Brent Budowsky is experiencing some exuberance. Whether it’s irrational exuberance or not, we may never know.
Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.
It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both Hillary Clinton and Sanders would defeat Trump by landslide margins. In the new Quinnipiac poll, Clinton would defeat Trump by 7 percentage points, which is itself impressive and would qualify as a landslide, while the Sanders lead of 13 points would bring a landslide of epic proportions.
Obviously, polls like this taken eleven months before a general election aren’t worth much. But there’s a point here regardless. There’s a pretty strong assumption in many quarters that a Brooklyn-raised seventy-four year old self-proclaimed socialist Jewish guy from granola-chomping Vermont doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected president of the United States. Yet, this Quinnipiac poll shows he’d schlong the current Republican front-runner, and schlong him like a drum. Not only that, but he’d have more potential coattails than Hillary Clinton.
Maybe that’s true right now–maybe it would even still be true next November–but that’s not the main point that Budowsky wants to make. His point is that Trump is getting too much media attention and Bernie Sanders (especially) and Hillary Clinton are getting too little.
I know a lot of regular voters who are not media-types who would vote for Sanders over Clinton in a heartbeat if only they could be assured that he wouldn’t lose a very winnable election. And who knows what happens when the Republicans bring out all their Willie Hortons and Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth? Does Sanders have the kind of teflon that the Clintons are famous for possessing?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do sometimes wonder if the right in this country will just completely and finally lose their shit if we elect someone like Sanders as president. Putting up with a President Hillary Clinton seems like indignity enough for these folks who have been raised on Vince Foster watermelon conspiracies and Benghazi heat-fever dreams. But, at least the Establishment knows that the Clintons are what happens to you when you lose an election and not some earth-shattering proof that your country has been lost forever and turned over to the communists.
Then part of me just has a prurient interest in seeing just how mental the right will go if it turns out that Sanders can not only win but that he can destroy them in a wipeout landslide.
What I am pretty sure about is that Trump is at least as unorthodox and unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate as Sanders would be. In a matchup between the two of them, we’d be assured of getting something we’ve never seen before and basically no one thought was possible.
I’d have plenty to write about, that’s for sure.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 23,2015
“Blood, Sweat And Trump”: The Fluids Of Women In Particular Rattle Trump
Everybody pees.
That’s actually the name of a public service campaign by the National Kidney Foundation, and I thought it a needless statement of the obvious until Donald Trump brought me to my senses. Apparently some people think that the laws of urology don’t apply to them. Apparently Trump is in this category.
On Monday he said this of Hillary Clinton’s mid-debate bathroom break: “I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting.”
He didn’t specify why. But it’s difficult to find anything indecorous about Clinton’s behavior unless you see it as entirely volitional and utterly controllable — something you do to indulge yourself, something that can be put off for hours or forever, an emblem of your weakness. I guess in Trump’s world, only “low energy” people need to go.
That would make sense, given how fantastical his cosmos is. It’s a place where thousands of Muslims in New Jersey publicly cheer the fall of the World Trade Center; where a stretch of the Potomac River alongside a Virginia golf club of his magically becomes a Civil War site; where his own net worth changes by an order of billions from one moment to the next, in accordance with his need to puff up his chest.
Why wouldn’t it also be a place where people relieve themselves only if they’re losers and they’re intent on a messiness that they can avoid? Maybe Trump really doesn’t pee. Maybe he outsources that to a Mexican immigrant in his employ.
You have to hand it to him: He divines character flaws where no one else could or would. Through his warped lens, there’s shame in John McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, horror in Clinton’s use of a toilet, dysfunction in each bead of Marco Rubio’s sweat.
Those last two items underscore his bizarre obsession with, and objection to, body fluids. In early November, Daniel Lippman of Politico noted that Trump had “remarked on Rubio’s perspiration at least eight times in the last seven weeks.” On two of those occasions, Trump suggested that sweating would put Rubio at a disadvantage in negotiations with Vladimir Putin, who would find him too soggy.
The fluids of women in particular rattle Trump. When a lawyer who was questioning him during a 2011 deposition asked for a break so that she could leave the room and pump breast milk for her 3-month-old daughter, he was unhinged.
“You’re disgusting,” he berated her, according to a story in The Times earlier this year by Michael Barbaro and Steve Eder. Then he stormed out of the deposition.
More famously, he reflected on Megyn Kelly’s interrogation of him at the first Republican presidential debate by saying that “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
Clinton’s bathroom break — or, more precisely, Trump’s revulsion toward it — lies at the intersection of his misogyny and his fastidiousness. He’s a germophobe who once labeled himself “a clean hands freak,” called handshakes a “terrible custom” and said that the obligation to engage in them was one of the great curses of celebrity like his.
Even so, a kidney doctor I know was baffled by his latest outburst.
“Urine is sterile,” Maya Rao, an assistant professor of nephrology at Columbia University, pointed out. “It’s not ‘disgusting.’ Wow. I literally feel like I’m dealing with an elementary-school child and we’re talking about cooties.”
Trump is routinely — and rightly — tagged as a playground bully, but that phrase doesn’t do full justice to his arrested development, his potty mouth and the puerile nature of his vulgar bleats.
He taunts people for being unpopular, for being unattractive, for physical disabilities. The altitude of his debate vocabulary is only millimeters above “I know you are but what am I,” words that he’ll surely utter before this is all over.
On Monday he not only cringed at Clinton’s bathroom visit, he mocked her loss in the 2008 presidential election by substituting a phallic verb for the word defeated.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is your Republican front-runner. It’s probably too late to teach him manners, but maybe not to teach him biology: When you imbibe fluids, you excrete fluids, sometimes through sweat, often through urine.
And while “the typical person goes to the bathroom every three or four hours,” said Matthew Rutman, a urologist at Columbia, that frequency increases for someone who’s older, who’s enduring stress, who’s ingesting caffeine. In other words, for most presidential candidates.
Everybody pees. But it’s the rare man-child who finds that worthy of ridicule. And it’s up to voters: Is that the kind of exceptionalism you want in the White House?
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 23, 2015
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