Trump threatens to attack Clintons if more damaging tapes of him go public

Donald Trump emerged from Sunday night’s presidential debate, ready to sling more mud.

Trump, speaking before a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday afternoon, said he's been ganged up on ever since Friday's release of a 2005 tape that captured the billionaire speaking in incredibly crude terms about women.


“I was getting beaten up for 72 hours on all the networks for inappropriate words 12 years ago — locker room talk, whatever you wanna call it,” Trump said, referring to the wall-to-wall coverage of comments that described his ability to get away with sexual assault. “But, I said to myself, wait a minute — and I just saw very inappropriate words — but Bill Clinton sexually assaulted innocent women, and Hillary Clinton attacked those women viciously. One of them said more viciously than he attacked them.”

Trump warned against the release of more damaging tapes of his past comments, threatening to continue attacking the Clintons over former President Bill Clinton’s alleged infidelities and Hillary Clinton’s response to those women’s accusations if more such tapes emerge.

Though Clinton’s campaign has denied any involvement in leaking the “Access Hollywood” clip that has dogged Trump’s campaign all weekend and prompted an exodus of support from prominent Republicans, Trump said more such releases will come at a risk for the Clintons — he cast Bill Clinton as a predator Monday and Hillary Clinton as a “total hypocrite” who enabled him to hurt more women.



“If they wanna release more tapes saying inappropriate things, we’ll continue to talk about Bill and Hillary Clinton doing inappropriate things,” Trump said. “There are so many of them, folks.”

Trump aggressively went after Hillary Clinton at his rally, reviving a number of attack lines he used in Sunday’s debate all the while ignoring the news that rippled through Washington: House Speaker Paul Ryan dumped Trump earlier Monday (though he hasn’t officially rescinded his endorsement), telling Republicans in his chamber on a conference call that he will no longer defend Trump and that they should do whatever’s necessary to maintain their majority.

Clinton emerged from Trump's weekend of wreckage with a double-digit lead over the billionaire nationally, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Monday. His 11-point deficit threatens to be a drag on congressional Republicans’ reelection efforts.

Trump has repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton since the revelation of extremely lewd comments the real estate mogul made about women were exposed on Friday. In a brief written statement, Trump dismissed his remarks about trying to sleep with a married woman and groping women’s genitals and forcibly kissing them with impunity because he’s famous as “locker room banter.”

He accused Bill Clinton of having said “far worse” to him in private conversations while golfing. But he didn’t leave it at that, and he didn’t stop there. He attacked the Clintons again in a video statement released shortly after midnight Saturday and once again Sunday evening at the St. Louis debate, which the GOP nominee preceded with a surprise panel on Facebook Live featuring women who have accused the Clintons of wrongdoing.

Those women — Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Kathy Shelton — also attended the debate. Trump’s campaign had even devised a covert plan to have the four women join the Trump family’s box and cause a scene on national television by entering the debate hall with the 42nd president. But the plan that was thwarted by a co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which threatened to have security remove the women from the family-only elevated box.

“You probably saw yesterday: We brought four wonderful women to St. Louis. And honestly, it was both very beautiful and very sad,” Trump said Monday. “Really, they had been trying to get their feelings out for so long and the media wouldn’t take it.”

That is, until they appeared with Trump. “So they were able to get what they wanted to get out,” Trump said, going on to quote Broaddrick’s accusations about Bill Clinton’s alleged rape and Hillary Clinton’s alleged threat. “She’s been struggling to get the media to pay attention to her for many, many years. So last night I decided we would expose the hypocrisy of the Clintons and the media to the entire world.”

Trump re-upped his claim that Hillary Clinton has “hatred in her heart.” He restated that Bill Clinton is “the worst abuser of women ever to sit in the Oval Office” and blamed Hillary Clinton for “systematically” attacking and discrediting “the victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and assault.”

“These things aren’t written by the media, but they’re true,” said Trump, who rattled off about a half-dozen of Bill Clinton’s accusers but cautioned that “many, many more” exist (the Clintons have denied such allegations). “For decades, Hillary Clinton has been deeply familiar with her husband’s predatory behavior, and instead of trying to stop it, she made it possible for him to take advantage of even more women. She put even more women in harm’s way and then she goes out and says, ‘I love women, I’m gonna help women, I’m gonna help them.’ She’s a total hypocrite.”

Trump slammed the alleged “hypocrisy of the media and our politicians.” “They condemned my words, but they ignore and defend the reprehens— and this is the way it is — the reprehensible actions of Hillary and Bill Clinton that have destroyed and hurt so many lives.”

He also blasted Hillary Clinton for defending a man who allegedly raped then-12-year-old Kathy Shelton. “As the lawyer for the rapist, Hillary Clinton said the little girl was emotionally unstable and had a — quote — tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing. Hillary ruined that young girl’s life,” Trump said. “Destroyed her life, and years later she was recorded laughing about it on videotape. She was laughing at the girl.”

While the notion that Clinton was laughing at Shelton has been debunked, Trump added: “There’s nothing Hillary Clinton won’t do or say to obtain power, and it’s about time people started to understand that. But the hypocrites in the media don’t wanna talk about what Hillary Clinton has done to these victims. They don’t wanna talk about what their other political heroes have done to other innocent girls and women.”