Can Donald Trump turn Bill Clinton into a 'Bill Cosby'?
Can this presidential campaign get any weirder?
Sensing nothing left to lose, according to reports, Republican hopeful Donald Trump's campaign is going for broke with a scorched earth strategy, intended to make a "Bill Cosby" out of Bill Clinton.
Just as Cosby went from national hero to national pariah after a parade of women charged him with decades of sexually predatory acts, Team Trump hopes to do the same to the former president.
Yes, I know, Bill Clinton's not running. His wife is. But the Trump campaign aims to smear her as an enabler of sexual violence.
"We're going to turn him into Bill Cosby," Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Trump staffers, according to a report by Bloomberg's Josh Green -- who quotes two unnamed Trump advisers who were present. "He's a violent sexual predator who physically abuses women who he assaults. And she takes the lead on the intimidation of the victims."
One could question whether, with all due respect to the accusers, Team Trump believes in protecting the constitutional rights of the accused. But this particular ploy of resurrecting accusations that were investigated but never prosecuted -- even by special Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr -- at least 20 years ago is not designed to debate our criminal justice system. It is intended to tar the Clintons with crimes against women, a group that turned heavily against Trump even before the new allegations came out.
The new strategy began as a defensive move. Before the second presidential debate, Trump was revealed in a 2005 "Access Hollywood" hot-mic video as boasting about using his celebrity status to go after women like a sexual predator. He apologized for what he called "locker room talk" and accused Bill Clinton of doing worse as president.
He also appeared on debate night with three of Bill Clinton's most prominent accusers -- Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones -- plus Kathy Shelton, who argues that Hillary Clinton, as an attorney, questioned Shelton's credibility in the 1970s while representing a man she says raped her.
Ironically, just as Team Trump was about to launch a scorched-earth assault against the Clintons in the final weeks of the campaign, Trump was confronted with new charges, this time of sexual assault by multiple women.
They said they were provoked into going public in much the way that Cosby's accusers had been -- by Trump's denial during the debate that he had laid his hands on any actual women.
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