Comedy Central's Trevor Noah has taken aim at Hillary Clinton over her latest comments about the Monica Lewinsky affair, saying they were "not cool" and that the 2016 presidential candidate tried to "deflect" when asked about her husband's conduct.
During an interview with Sunday Morning on CBS, Clinton was asked if in retrospect her husband Bill Clinton should have resigned in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. "Absolutely not," Clinton replied. When correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked: "It wasn't an abuse of power?" Clinton responded: "No. No."
When the interviewer made the point that many believe the president could not have a consensual relationship with an intern because of the imbalance of power between them, Clinton said Lewinsky "was an adult."
She then said: "Let me ask you this. Where is the investigation of the current incumbent?"
"No, Hillary," Noah said on Monday's edition of The Daily Show after airing a clip of the CBS interview with Clinton.
"Oh I'm sorry, man. Look, here's the thing. That's not cool. Maybe it was different in the nineties, but today I think we're all understanding that there's a massive power imbalance between an intern and the president of the United States.
"Forget intern, a president with anyone is a power imbalance...And what's also not cool is Hillary trying to deflect and make this about Trump. You're not in a position to be throwing stones at someone, Hillary."
Bill Clinton was nearly impeached by Congress in 1998 for lying about his affair with Lewinsky, then a White House intern in her early 20s, but his presidency survived. Around the anniversary, the incident was reanalyzed through the lens of the #MeToo campaign against the sexual exploitation of women.
In a reflection 20 years after the scandal, for which she was vilified, Lewinsky wrote about the personal implications of #MeToo for Vanity Fair. Lewisnky said that because of the movement, she was "beginning…to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I'm beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot."
Former president Bill Clinton appeared on The Daily Show back in June during a book tour. Noah asked Clinton if it has been "hard for you to reprogram your brain" because of #MeToo.
"It means that I have to not react to the raw pain of having to relive something that happened 20 years ago and I need to be aware that, unfortunately, there's still millions of people every day who face objectification, disrespect, discrimination, and sometimes outright abuse," Clinton said.
"In the workplace, on the street, and at home. And now we're all alive to it in ways we weren't before and we're all trying to work our way through—not all of us, but most of us are—how we can use this moment to build a better country in person, after person, after person's lives.
"And that should be the number one priority of everybody. That's how we should think about this #MeToo moment. We can't waste it. We gotta do better."
But in an NBC interview beforehand, the former president grew frustrated by questions about Lewinsky. Clinton was asked wether, if he were president today in 2018, in the context of #MeToo, he would resign over Lewinsky?
"I don't think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts," Clinton said. "If the facts were the same today, I wouldn't."
He accused the journalist of only presenting one side of what happened, and said somebody should ask journalists questions about how they formulate their questions.
"I dealt with it 20 years ago plus, and the American people—two-thirds of them—stayed with me, and I've tried to do a good job since then with my life and with my work. That's all I have to say to you," Clinton said.
Clinton later told Noah the NBC interview "wasn't my best hour, was it?"
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Shane Croucher is a Senior Editor based in London, UK. He oversees the My Turn team. He has previously overseen ... Read more
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