http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/264218-trump-campaign-hillary-bullied-women-to-hide-bills-sexistDecember 24, 2015, 05:20 pm
Trump campaign: Hillary bullied women to hide Bill's 'sexist secrets'
By Jonathan Easley
Donald Trump’s campaign is escalating its war of words with Hillary Clinton, claiming that the Democratic front-runner bullied women to hide her husband’s “sexist secrets” and accusing her campaign of “acting like 9-year-old little girls.”
In an interview late Wednesday on CNN, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson unloaded on Clinton and her campaign, returning fire after Clinton condemned Trump’s “penchant for sexism.”
“What you have on Hillary Clinton’s side are a bunch of people, including women — liberal women — who want to run around talking about the war on women,” Pierson said. “They want to burn their bras and complain about equal pay and be treated as men, and the second they get criticized for anything they start acting like 9-year-old little girls.”
The feud began on Monday, when Trump ripped Clinton at one of his rallies, saying she got “schlonged” by then-Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries, and mocking her for returning late to the debate stage because she had to use the bathroom.
Pierson denied that the term “schlonged” was sexist or should be considered offensive.
“You know, no one really complained in 2011 when he used the exact same word to describe a woman winning an election cycle... and so all of a sudden it’s horrible,” Pierson said. “But Hillary Clinton has some nerve to talk about the war on women and the bigotry toward women when she has a serious problem in her husband.”
At a rally on Tuesday, Clinton declined to address the controversy with Trump directly, but said voters “shouldn’t let anybody bully his way into the presidency.”
In a personal attack, Pierson on Wednesday said Clinton is the bully.
“What’s interesting about this, this notion of being bullied is, I mean, I can think of quite a few women that have been bullied by Hillary Clinton to hide her husband’s misogynist, sexist secrets,” Pierson said.
The Clinton campaign has sought to steer clear of engaging directly with Trump, saying after his “schlonged” remarks that they didn’t intend to weigh in, but that “everyone who understands the humiliation this degrading language inflicts on all women should.”
Trump responded by warning Clinton not to “play the war on women or women being degraded card.”
Clinton finally lashed out at Trump in a Wednesday interview with the Des Moines Register.
"I really deplore the tone of his campaign, the inflammatory rhetoric that he is using to divide people, and his going after groups of people with hateful, incendiary rhetoric," she said. "Nothing really surprises me anymore. I don’t know that he has any boundaries at all. His bigotry, his bluster, his bullying have become his campaign. And he has to keep sort of upping the stakes and going even further."
"I don’t respond to him personally, because he thrives on that kind of exchange,” she continued. “I think he has to answer for what he says, and I assume that others will make the larger point about his language. It’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism. Again, I’m not sure anybody’s surprised that he keeps pushing the envelope."
