Presidential races

Fiorina defends Trump: ‘Bill Clinton is fair game’

GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said Monday that Donald Trump is justified in publicly targeting former President Bill Clinton in connection with his wife’s campaign for the White House.

“Of course Bill Clinton is fair game,” she said on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.” “He’s a former president.”

{mosads}“As I recall, Donald Trump threw [former President] George W. Bush under the bus way back in September,” Fiorina added of the GOP’s current presidential front-runner.

Fiorina said, however, that the former first lady and secretary of State is her own candidate.

“But you’re not going to beat Hillary Clinton by attacking Bill Clinton,” she said. “You’re going to beat Hillary Clinton — I’m going to beat Hillary Clinton — by attacking her track record and her trustworthiness.”

Fiorina added that she is unsurprised Clinton is discussing her gender on the 2016 campaign trail.

“Of course she’s going to play the woman card, that’s what she does,” she said.

“There are people out there — lots of people, men and women — who think it’s time for a woman president,” Fiorina continued. “My message to them will be, ‘How about an honest woman?'”

Trump is escalating his personal attacks against the Clintons following reports Bill Clinton is joining his wife on the campaign trail next year. He accused the former president of having a “terrible record of women’s abuse” Monday morning.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, charged last week that Trump has his own “penchant for sexism” toward women. She has harshly rebuked Trump for saying she “got schlonged” during her loss in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary to then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Trump has denied the term — Yiddish for “penis” — is vulgar, arguing that it describes overwhelming defeat instead.