"Go after your enemies": Trump’s 21-year-old impeachment playbook

It’s all part of Trump’s strategy of abandoning one’s compunctions and engaging in total warfare — a strategy he first drafted 21 years ago during President Bill Clinton’s own impeachment hell. “Go after your enemies. I mean, they’re after you. Go after your enemies,” he recommended during an appearance on Hardball in September 1998.

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“I think that Clinton probably is too nice a guy in a certain respect,” he told host Chris Matthews. “I don’t think he’s going after people the way he should and I really believe his thing is to be liked and I don’t think that’s a very good position to be in right now.”

In 1998 and 1999, Trump — then just another billionaire who had yet to launch The Apprentice — used repeated opportunities in the spotlight to share his views on impeachment and what he would do if he were in Clinton’s position. At the time, he was storming the airwaves to promote his book, “The Art of the Comeback,” while talking up his first dance toward the presidency as a potential candidate for the Reform Party…

Clinton’s denial in a Paula Jones deposition, Trump asserted back in the ’90s, was in fact illegal. “He could have said, ‘Look, I don’t want to discuss it,’” Trump suggested to Matt Lauer on The Today Show in October 1999. “I’ve seen politicians in New York that are scoundrels get away with that for years. ‘I don’t talk about my personal life…’ He should have done that. Instead, he had to lie.”

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