During Wednesday night’s Democratic primary debate, presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) ripped an applause line from former President George W. Bush and said the first thing she’d do if she were elected president would be to “Clorox the Oval Office.”
“So the first thing that I’m going to do when I’m president, is I’m going to Clorox the Oval Office,” said Gillibrand, earning cheers from the crowd.
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Gillibrand’s laugh line is rooted in the narrative that President Donald Trump is a sexual predator, which has been time and again echoed by elected Democrats. In December 2017, for example, the New York senator called for Trump to resign from office due to accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against him. “President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
However, Gillibrand has a history of aligning herself with men accused of sexual misconduct in an effort to advance her career, deflating her “Clorox” rip against Trump.
The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow, for instance, highlighted the politician’s ties to both former President Bill Clinton and Hollywood producer and Democrat mega-donor Harvey Weinstein, both of whom have been accused chronic sexual misconduct.
“‘The first thing I would do is Clorox the Oval Office,'” Schow mockingly quoted the presidential hopeful. “Also Gillibrand,” she added, captioning photos of the senator smiling next to both men.
Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich pointed out, “Gillibrand says she will Clorox the Oval Office. Where was she [when] Bill Clinton left office? Oh, using him and Hillary to fundraise and win elections.”
In 2017, Gillibrand finally said Mr. Clinton should have resigned after his infamous sex scandal with then-intern Monica Lewinsky. She made the statement against the former president about a month before she called on Trump to resign from office; the convenient timing of her belated condemnation did not go unnoticed by critics.
But just a year prior, in 2016, Gillibrand was using Mr. Clinton to help her political career. As previously highlighted by The Daily Wire, Gillibrand gushed over Mr. Clinton while campaigning for the Senate: “I was lucky enough to receive guidance and mentorship from Hillary during that run, and was truly honored that President Bill Clinton campaigned for me in my first run for Congress in 2006,” she said.
Here are other tweets documenting Gillibrand’s reliance on Clinton:
Gillibrand had also aligned herself with alleged serial sexual predator Weinstein, taking thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the producer and appearing alongside the donor at the Time 100 Gala in April 2014.
As noted by USA Today in October 2017, Gillibrand later “donated $11,800 of Weinstein’s political contributions to the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN.”