Facebook still banning Trump — for now — despite campaign promises
Donald Trump has a lot of explaining to do if he wants to preserve his campaign’s recent gains in the polls and avoid the fate of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who endured the fallout of an online sex scandal during his White House bid.
A new Associated Press/GfK poll shows that Clinton’s campaign has suffered after the revelation of a videotape from a 1997 investigation of him paying a pornographic film actor to wear a wire and record conversations with him.
Clinton’s campaign has made a concerted effort to turn the videotape into a vehicle to raise the profile of his wife, Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, the campaign made the announcement that Vice President Al Gore will host Trump for a live-taped interview with Bill Clinton.
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“When I was on the phone with President Clinton three days ago and I shared with him your campaign’s commitment to putting politics aside and to working together to win, he said to me, ‘It’s a great honour to accept your invitation to speak to you, but I’ve got to be completely honest with you. First, let me say that I would love to have President Hillary Clinton on our team,’ ” Trump told reporters Wednesday in Boca Raton, Florida. “And then I asked him, ‘What’s the second thing I have to tell you?’ Well, it was that he said, ‘If you don’t want my wife on our team, that’s OK, I’ll make her join our team.’ “
Trump continued: “He said it was a tough decision, but he respected my judgment.”
Trump is hoping the decision to host Clinton with Gore as a counterpoint to Gore hosting the New York Republican candidate, Governor George Pataki, who was forced to pull out because of a scheduling conflict.
The news was widely expected, given the closeness of the race for the Republican nomination.
Although the Trump campaign has made clear it has no intention of conceding the race, the decision to have Bill Clinton appear on the campaign trail with him was seen by some Republicans as an implicit concession.
Trump was clearly trying to signal to Republicans he was not going to back away from his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” and appoint more conservative judges and judges who would reverse decisions like Roe v. Wade and would protect