Until this week, it seemingly was a settled question. Bill Clinton’s soaring popularity suggested the public had come to terms with the messier aspects of his private conduct — the Monica Lewinsky scandal and other personal peccadilloes — and an unspoken consensus had formed around the notion that the former president’s behavior wasn’t germane to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Then Donald Trump, for whom no topic is ever off limits, succeeded in re-opening the discussion.


On Sunday, after Hillary Clinton called out his alleged “penchant for sexism,” Trump warned that her husband’s infidelity and the Clinton marriage on the whole were “fair game.” He doubled down in South Carolina Wednesday, calling Bill Clinton “one of the great abusers of the world.”

The latest bit of can’t-look-away performance art from the billionaire showman offers a glimpse at the kind of scorched earth campaign that might be ahead if Trump and Clinton capture their respective party nominations. But even if Trump falls short, his threat to revisit Bill Clinton’s indiscretions stands to add a new element of volatility to the presidential campaign — with highly unpredictable consequences.





“It’s not a political strategy he’s pursuing, it’s a short-term public relations strategy,” said Charlie Black, a longtime GOP lobbyist who’s advised a number of Republican presidential campaigns. “Every day, he figures out some way to dominate the news. But in the general election, not only is Bill Clinton still popular with a lot of swing voters, they don’t think it’s fair to run against the spouse. This is not a legitimate general election issue. It’s simply a tactic of Donald’s to dominate the news.”

Already, Trump’s gambit shows signs of altering the terms of debate, simply by announcing his intent.

“Mr. Trump is rude and crude, but in this case, he is raising an issue that rightly bears on the 2016 election campaign and the prospect of a third Clinton term. Mrs. Clinton wants to use her gender both as a political sword and shield to win the White House,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote Wednesday. “Yet no one in American politics better personifies a war on women than Mrs. Clinton’s husband.”



Top Republican operatives believe Trump — his own fraught marital history aside — has alighted on an attack that could affect the contours of the general election by limiting the effectiveness of the Democrats’ “War on Women” playbook.



“As usual, Donald Trump is a terrible messenger for this, but it's still a very valid area,” said Stuart Stevens, the GOP strategist who guided Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

Dick Wadhams, a veteran Republican strategist in Colorado, concurred, calling Trump a “flawed messenger with his own sexist comments,” but pointing out that Clinton’s “hypocrisy” over the treatment of women could hinder the former president’s own ability to serve as an effective campaign trail surrogate for his wife.

While Bill Clinton remains one of the most popular figures in American politics, his high approval rating has coincided with the passage of time since the Lewinsky scandal. When Clinton last stepped back into the daily campaign fray during his wife's 2008 primary bid, he was hardly an asset when he operated from a defensive stance, and managed to escalate racial tensions in South Carolina by referring to Barack Obama's campaign as "a fairy tale."

Thanks to Trump, the former president could face the prospect of a different kind of scrutiny on the campaign trail than he has been accustomed to in his post-White House career. The New Hampshire Union Leader — whose conservative publisher has publicly sparred with Trump this week — greeted news of Bill Clinton’s first campaign trip to the state next week with an editorial Wednesday reminding readers the former president is a “serial philanderer.”

Trump himself was eager to point out Wednesday that his mention of Bill Clinton’s past conduct has dominated cable news coverage of the race for the past several days. “Today, the television is going crazy,” the billionaire said during an hourlong rally in Hilton Head.



The free media saturation isn’t the only incentive for Trump. With the Iowa caucuses just 33 days away, Trump’s strategy offers him an opportunity to solidify his own credentials as a card-carrying, Clinton-hating conservative just as his rivals — most notably, Jeb Bush — are questioning whether he’s truly a Republican and highlighting Trump’s own historically cozy relationship with the Clintons.



Trump, who hosted Bill and Hillary at his third wedding, has made financial contributions to both in the past and praised Hillary Clinton in 2009 after she was sworn in as secretary of state.



“This is very fertile ground when you’re trying to win a Republican primary,” said Katie Packer, a GOP operative who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “Republican primary voters are still angry because they think Bill Clinton got away with something appalling, so they stand up and cheer when someone is trying to hold him accountable.”



But Republicans also recognize the potential for blowback against the party from Trump’s course of action.

Bush suggested as much on the campaign trail last week, telling reporters that Trump’s recent crude description of her 2008 primary defeat would enable Hillary Clinton to appear sympathetic.

“She’s great at being the victim,” Bush said. “She will use this in a way that won't be helpful to our cause.”

Bush and others can remember how the public rallied to Clinton’s side in the aftermath of her husband’s White House scandal. In her more than two decades in public life, Hillary Clinton’s favorability has never been higher than it was in December 1998 after the Lewinsky scandal and her husband was impeached, peaking at 67 percent, according to Gallup.

“We're a long ways away from that era, but the Clintons thrive off of playing the victim, and reminding Americans of the time in the Clintons' political life where Hillary was her most sympathetic is a risky proposition, even though Hillary Clinton's role in public life is very different now,” said Republican pollster Kristen Soltis-Anderson.

Dating to her first campaign in 2000, Clinton has demonstrated an ability to recast her opponents’ clumsy attacks — from Congressman Rick Lazio stepping into her personal space during a Senate debate, to Barack Obama’s 2008 assertion that she’s “likable enough,” to Bernie Sanders’ recent reference to “all the shouting in the world” — as sexist or misogynistic, often to devastating effect.

“We’ve done a lot of focus groups on this,” said Packer. “Independent women are very lukewarm to Hillary so there’s an opportunity; and the one thing that rallied them to her side was bringing up Bill Clinton’s improprieties. They don’t feel like it was her fault, they don’t blame her and they don’t judge her for coming to her husband’s defense.”



Until this week, Clinton had refused to take the bait from Trump, who’s been needling her for months with gender-coded insinuations about her “pantsuits” and her “unique relationship” with her “special friend,” referring to top aide Huma Abedin. Maintaining her message discipline won’t be easy against a sustained assault, especially one that’s so personal in nature.

"Trump is the master of sucking up all the oxygen in the news cycle, but Hillary actually walked into letting him bring up Bill's history as a sexual predator in context, and context hasn't been Trump's strong suit,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP consultant in California.