One of Donald Trump's senior political advisers said: "The Clintons don’t play bean bag; they’re very serious, they’re very skilled." | Getty Trump dredges up sordid Clinton accusations It’s going to be a nasty general election battle.

If there was any doubt about the nastiness of the upcoming general election fight between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump has obliterated it.

The Manhattan billionaire has launched his most personal attacks yet on the Clintons, dredging up decades-old conspiracy theories and allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of Bill Clinton to kick his “Crooked Hillary” assault into overdrive.


On Monday, Trump released a visceral video featuring the voices of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick and an image of Bill Clinton not-so-subtly chomping on a cigar. The women describe their allegations of being sexually assaulted by Clinton.

Later Monday, The Washington Post published a recent interview with Trump in which he called the 1993 death of former White House aide Vincent Foster “very fishy,” trying to lend credence to conspiracy theories suggesting that the Clintons somehow had a hand in his passing, which was ruled a suicide.

The insinuations and stark allegations are proving once again Trump’s ability to dominate headlines and airtime, and show the challenge Hillary Clinton will be up against as she tries to make her argument against the real estate mogul.

On Tuesday, Trump’s surrogates flooded the airwaves as they sought to further undermine Hillary Clinton, questioning how she can be a champion of women when she enabled her husband’s alleged misdeeds.

It didn’t all go smoothly.

Trump senior adviser and special counsel Michael Cohen was pressed on CNN’s “New Day” about Trump’s past statements sympathetic to Bill Clinton.

Cohen was particularly pressed about Trump’s comments in 1998 on Fox News in which he called Bill Clinton “a victim himself” and lashed out at Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg and Monica Lewinsky as “truly an unattractive cast of characters.”

“He was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons, and he was trying to protect a friend, all right,” Cohen said. “Now, it’s a different game. It’s 2016, he is the presidential, he’s the Republican presidential nominee.”

CNN’s Chris Cuomo engaged in an extended back-and-forth with Cohen in a studio interview that lasted 15 minutes.

“Michael, Michael. If you decide to run for office and people say, ‘Hey, you know Cuomo, back then you used to say he’s a bum,’” Cuomo said. “I will always deny that,” Cohen said, with a laugh.

It is “absolutely” OK to pursue that line of attack, Cohen suggested. “Come on, Michael, please,” Cuomo responded.

“If he was telling the truth, then it’s absolutely fine,” Cohen explained. But Trump was not lying, he clarified. Rather, “he was being a true friend” to the president. “It didn’t matter to him at that point in time,” Cohen remarked.

Cuomo followed up: “So he would be friends with a guy he thought was a piece of crap, basically?”

“What his relationship with his wife is between the two of them,” Cohen said, in reference to the Clintons. “Now it’s different. They’re attacking Mr. Trump on a daily basis. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent in attack ads, right.”





"He called Paula Jones a loser!" Cuomo exclaimed, ticking through some of the examples noted by The Washington Post in “Trump’s flip-flop on whether the Bill Clinton sex scandals are important,” a fact check it published at 3 a.m. Tuesday.

Facing down MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki later Tuesday morning, Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis tried to explain why his candidate’s campaign would seemingly level virtually the same attacks that failed to bring down the Clintons in the 1990s.

“It’s a different set of issues we’re faced with here,” Clovis said, pointing out that the network had devoted the first block of its programming that hour to covering the preliminary hearing in one of the sexual assault cases against Bill Cosby. “And then we come to this issue here, and we’re essentially talking about the fact we have a war on women being waged by the Democrats, or at least against the Republicans. That’s the accusation. And yet we have the person who is the lead of that fight on the part of the Democrats is in fact, the person who could not control the sexual predation that went on in her own home. So this is really an ironic aspect of this whole presentation here.”

Clovis said that what’s “really at the heart of this is that we have someone who is a lead person in this accusation of Republicans about the war on women and she couldn’t control the war on women and the sexual predation that went on in her own home.”

So far, Clinton’s camp has refused to directly engage with Trump on the allegations, expressing confidence such attacks will eventually backfire, especially with women.

“To me, every day he spends in this type of stuff is a misspent opportunity by him in terms of doing the outreach he needs to do to improve his numbers,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said Monday on Bloomberg TV.

Conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, however, on Tuesday called the attack line a “no-brainer.”

“Is Donald Trump telling people who don’t know things, things they don’t know, that the media won’t tell them, or is he engaged in just smears? And I think the odds are it’s gonna be seen as the opposite. It’s gonna be seen as Trump doing the job the American media and the Republican Party won’t do,” Limbaugh said, noting that younger voters may not be so aware of the past Clinton scandals.

“What is so wrong about people being reminded of the Clinton past, or in some cases, being told about it for the first time? I mean, is anything in the past ever out of bounds for a Republican candidate?”

Barry Bennett, a senior political adviser to Trump’s campaign, described the strategy to Fox News on Tuesday as a “necessary thing.”

“I don’t judge these things in good and bad; it’s a necessary thing, unfortunately. I mean the Clintons don’t play bean bag; they’re very serious, they’re very skilled. They’ve destroyed a lot of their enemies so, you know, we need to do everything we can to defeat them,” Bennett said.

Fox News anchor Martha McCallum pushed back at the notion that the strategy would necessarily be successful, remarking upon Trump’s past praise and comments dishing out advice to Bill Clinton. “There is no doubt, Barry you will see ads from the Clinton campaign with Donald Trump saying those words coming right back at you,” she said.

“The problem is, Bill Clinton didn’t follow the advice, right? He lied. He eventually had to admit he lied,” Bennett said. “Tried to cover it up. And then they set out the campaign to destroy these women. I think it is all fair game.”

Although TV anchors pushed back a bit against what they presented as Trump’s hypocrisy, such inconsistencies haven’t hurt him in the past.

However, The Post’s fact check laid out its case, declaring that Trump earned “an upside-down Pinocchio — for statements that represent a clear but unacknowledged ‘flip-flop’ from a previously-held position.”

The Post’s account begins with a Dec. 27, 1997, interview Trump gave to CNN’s “Evans & Novak” in which he said Clinton had done a “terrific job” as president.





The article goes on to note that on Aug. 27, 1998, nine days after Clinton admitted to an "inappropriate relationship" with Lewinsky, Trump told Chris Matthews on CNBC that the "best thing he has going is the fact that the economy’s doing great." As for Clinton's personal woes, Trump remarked that he "would have done something certainly different than what they did," adding that Paula Jones, who accused Clinton of exposing himself and propositioning her for sex in a hotel room was a "loser."

“I’m not even sure that he shouldn’t have just gone in and taken the Fifth Amendment and said, ‘Look, I don’t get along with this man, [independent prosecutor Kenneth] Starr. He’s after me. He’s a Republican. He’s this, he’s that,’ and, you know, just taken the Fifth Amendment," Trump said. "It’s a terrible thing for a president to take the Fifth Amendment, but he probably should have done it. I don’t think he could have done any worse than what’s happened. It's such an embarrassment to him."

Asked by Matthews whether he had ever mulled a run for office, whether for the governor's mansion or the White House, Trump commented, "Can you imagine how controversial that’d be? You think about him with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine..."

The Post noted that Trump in September 1999 reiterated that Clinton should have considered pleading the Fifth and lamented the president's taste in women. "He handled the Monica situation disgracefully," Trump told The New York Times' Maureen Dowd. "It's sad because he would go down as a great President if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he'd had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can't get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former President begging to get in a golf club. It's unthinkable.''