Donald Trump said he held back from bringing up Monica Lewinsky at the Monday presidential debate — because he saw Chelsea Clinton in the audience.
“When she hit me at the end with the women, I was going to hit her with her husband’s women and I decided I shouldn’t do it because her daughter was in the room,” Trump said Tuesday morning in a phone interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
Clinton had taken aim at Trump by quoting sexist comments he’d made in the past.
“I didn’t feel comfortable doing it with Chelsea in the room. I think Chelsea is a fine young lady,” Trump said in the morning-after interview.
After the debate, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is advising Trump, said the Republican nominee was going to call Clinton “phony as a feminist.”
“Why? Because you take money from countries that stone women, you take money from countries that imprison women, you take money from countries where women can’t drive, you take money — not money — millions and hundreds of millions of dollars that treat women as chattel,” Giuliani said of what Trump had planned to tell Clinton. He didn’t specify what funding he was referring to.
Giuliani continued: “You attacked Monica Lewinsky and said she was basically insane when it turned out your husband had violated an intern in the Oval Office of the White House, disgraced the United States of America. And you were one of the primary attackers. And after your years with Bill Clinton, if you didn’t know that Monica Lewinsky was telling the truth, then you’re not smart enough to be president.”
Trump and Giuliani both had highly publicized, well-documented extramarital affairs. Trump instead on Tuesday night countered Clinton’s volleys with an attack on Rosie O’Donnell.
Giuliani said Trump didn’t choke by failing to bring up Lewinsky. “He was being a nice man,” the former mayor said of his friend of 28 years.