Electoral battles

The surprisingly logical reason Donald Trump is bringing up Bill Clinton's sex scandals

A president sleeping with a White House intern, by contrast, is clear cut-and-dried sexual harassment. It’s absolutely unacceptable behavior toward a subordinate. In a private company, it’s a fireable offense. It might have been accepted as normal in the '90s, but sexual harassment has slowly come to be recognized as a serious offense in workplaces, and exploiting the power of a senior office to get a lower-ranked employee to consent to sex is a particularly egregious manifestation of it.

More to the point, we now have 20 years of hindsight, and it’s clear that the real victim of the imbroglio was Lewinsky herself, who has been denied the ability to live a normal life with relative anonymity and has become an activist against online abuse after enduring loads of it herself.

The even clearer examples of this are cases where Clinton was accused not of consensual sex but of sexual assault. Lewinsky and Clinton’s previous paramour Gennifer Flowers tend to get placed in the same bucket as Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, but all three of the latter women accused him of sexual assault. Broaddrick claims that Clinton raped her; Jones alleged that he exposed himself to her; Willey accused him of grabbing her breasts and forcing her to touch his genitals.