If Democratic or Republican opponents want to drag some of the sordid details from Donald Trump’s personal life onto the campaign trail, that’s fine by him.
The GOP presidential front-runner said Tuesday that it would be fair for the media or rivals to investigate his background, similar to how he’s bringing up Bill Clinton’s personal life in attacks against his wife, Hillary Clinton.
“Yes, they would be,” he said in response to a question about his personal “indiscretions” while speaking to reporters aboard his personal plane before a rally in Iowa.
Trump didn’t go into specifics, and reporters didn’t follow up on the question. But his personal life at times has been tabloid fodder, most famously in the early 1990s when his marriage to his first wife, Ivana Trump, fell apart after he had an extramarital affair with model and actress Marla Maples. Trump eventually married Maples in 1993, and the two divorced six years later. Trump married his current wife, Melania, in 2005.
The billionaire has labeled Bill Clinton and his marital infidelity as “fair game,” a charge that comes as the former president prepares to hit the trail next week to campaign for his wife. Clinton allies have bristled at the idea of Trump bringing personal dirt onto the trail, with the candidate saying he has a “penchant for sexism.”
“Frankly, Hillary brought up the whole thing with “sexist,” and all I did was reverse it on her because she’s got a major problem, happens to be right in her house,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “So, if she wants to do that, we’re going to go right after the president, the ex-president. We’ll see how it all comes out, and I feel very confident that it’ll come out very well for us.”