The Democratic nominee refuses to play along and talk about the most humiliating chapter of the Clinton marriage. | Getty Clinton says no to Trump’s sex talk The former first lady is icing out Trump's threats to dredge up Bill Clinton's 1990s sex scandals.

Donald Trump is itchy, scratchy, just dying to talk about Bill Clinton’s 1990s sex scandals — but Hillary Clinton just won’t play along.

Trump’s posse of oft-divorced surrogates spent much of the past 48 hours congratulating the thrice-married real estate developer for not bringing up the documented marital affairs and rumored indiscretions — less a dog whistle than a bullhorn blast intended to rattle a re-energized opponent and inject the issue into the campaign.


In the wake of Clinton’s strong showing at Hofstra on Monday night, the GOP nominee repeatedly patted himself on the back for having the self-restraint to eschew the scandals of decades past — a Trump classic stratagem to get everyone else — but, no, not him — to talk about the most humiliating chapter of the Clinton marriage and shift the narrative away from his shaky debate performance.

But when a New York Times reporter asked the first female major party nominee late Thursday on her campaign plane if it was her responsibility to “speak out on a spouse’s indiscretions or past,” Clinton icily answered with a single word.

“No,” was all she said.

Meanwhile, Trump — who spent much of his pre-political career boasting about his sexual prowess and commenting on the physical appearance of women — stoked a fire he himself had sparked. When a reporter asked him on Thursday if Bill Clinton’s affairs reflected on Hillary Clinton, he offered a verbal wink.

“You’ll have to figure that out,” he said. “I think it's pretty simple to figure that out.”

That followed a day of Clinton scandal-stirring by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the man who brought impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton in 1998 — which turned out to be one of the most self-destructive boomerang attacks in recent political history, resulting in Gingrich’s own political ruin.

That didn’t stop him from jumping back into the fray with both tassled loafers. Trump, he said, was “a gentleman” for holding back a verbal onslaught on former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs during the first prime-time showdown between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

“I’m very proud that at the very end, when she attacked and went off on this whole rant about women — and you could see his face — in the Republican primary, he would have just smashed her,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Thursday on the Fox News commentator’s radio program, which was first reported by BuzzFeed.

“He thought about it, and I’m sure he said to himself, ‘a president of the United States shouldn’t attack somebody personally when their daughter is sitting in the audience,’” Gingrich said. “And he bit his tongue, and he was a gentleman, and I thought in many ways that was the most important moment of the whole evening. He proved that he had the discipline to remain as a decent guy even when she was disgusting.”

Gingrich is an odd messenger of marital fealty. He married one of his teachers in high school, then told her he wanted a divorce when she was recovering from cancer.

The twice-divorced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, another high-profile Trump surrogate, didn’t let his own checkered personal past get in the way of whacking the Clintons.

“The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office, and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky,” Giuliani said on debate night in a video posted on Twitter. “And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”

Giuliani, according to numerous published reports, cheated on his second wife with his own press secretary at City Hall during his mayoralty — and was forced to move out of his official residence, Gracie Mansion, by his estranged wife, Donna Hanover.

If Hillary Clinton herself views the line of questioning as politically sleazy and personally painful, Clinton’s staff and allies said they relish the rehash. The former first lady’s dignified response in the late 1990s was, perversely, a rare interlude of sky-high personal popularity that contributed to her election to the Senate in 2000 as the first presidential spouse ever to make the transition to elected office.

“This is great, I can’t believe he’s going there — more, more, more!” said a former adviser to both Clintons.

“After his disastrous debate performance and his sexist attack on a former Miss Universe over her weight, Donald Trump is now trying to deflect by going after Hillary Clinton about her marriage,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement on Thursday. “While Trump and his lieutenants like Roger Stone and David Bossie may want to dredge up failed attacks from the 1990s, as many Republicans have warned, this is a mistake that is going to backfire.”

Gingrich himself has proven to be thin-skinned when challenged about his own private life. When confronted by fresh allegations from his second ex-wife at the opening of a Republican primary debate in 2012, Gingrich went after the debate moderator, CNN’s John King, and the rest of the media. The explosive moment met with a roar of approval from the South Carolina crowd.

Trump’s insistence on bringing up the issue seems curious, given his already low ratings among women — and a quarter of women polled after Monday’s debate said they viewed him less favorably after he repeatedly interrupted Clinton. Even more puzzling: Trump’s decision to jump into a trap set by Clinton, who brought up disparaging comments he made about Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe winner who gained weight after winning the crown. Both Trump and Gingrich — overweight and divorced — defended the nominee’s past comments, even as advisers recommended they dodge the controversy.

The attacks — instead of shifting focus from the debate — seem to have highlighted divisions within Trump’s own ranks. The hosts of “The View” on Thursday tried to get Kellyanne Conway to articulate why the campaign thinks it’s fair game to dredge up Bill Clinton’s infidelities to attack Hillary Clinton.

“I'm not advising him to go there,” Conway said, while adding, “it's fair game to think about how Hillary Clinton treated those women after the fact.”

Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie said that “clearly Mr. Trump held his tongue” at Monday night’s presidential debate when Hillary Clinton raised the Manhattan billionaire’s history of derogatory remarks about women.

Toward the end of the debate, Clinton managed to squeeze in a line of attack against Trump, labeling him as “a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.” Almost immediately after the debate, Trump insinuated that he had considered responding by raising Bill Clinton’s history of marital infidelities but opted against it because the couple’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was in the debate hall.

That Trump had considered such an attack was fleshed out more fully by his surrogates and by the candidate himself in an array of TV news interviews Tuesday morning. The GOP nominee told Fox News that “I really eased up because I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings” in Monday night’s debate, and that “I may hit her harder in certain ways” in future debates.

“I think that if you look at Hillary Clinton’s background and if you look at her being an enabler, really, in the ’90s and really attacking these women, it goes against everything that she now tries to spout as a candidate for president,” Bossie said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. “She’ll say and do anything. Those are Barack Obama’s words, not mine. She’ll say and do anything to become president of the United States. And I think we’re seeing that now.”

Politics aside, the Lewinsky scandal — and a host of other alleged instances of philandering by the ex-president stoked by conservative media — is one of the most sensitive topics inside the former first family, a wrenching trial that took years for the candidate and her daughter Chelsea, who was a teenager at the time, to get over.

“Well, my reaction to that is just what my reaction has been kind of every time Trump has gone after my mom or my family, which is that it’s a distraction from his inability to talk about what’s actually at stake in this election,” Chelsea Clinton told Salon this week.

“And candidly, I don’t remember a time in my life when my parents and my family weren’t being attacked, and so it just sort of seems to be in that tradition,” added the candidate’s daughter, who was friendly with Trump’s daughter Ivanka before the campaign. “What I find most troubling by far ... are Trump’s continued, relentless attacks on whole swaths of our country and even our global community: women, Muslims, Americans with disabilities, a Gold Star family. I mean, that, to me, is far more troubling than whatever his most recent screed against my mom or my family [is].”

