Here's The Real Reason Trump Wanted Gennifer Flowers At The Debate

Here's The Real Reason Trump Wanted Gennifer Flowers At The Debate

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When Donald Trump threatened to invite Gennifer Flowers to Monday night's presidential debate, he claimed it was to get back at Hillary Clinton, who'd asked billionaire Mark Cuban to be her guest.

But Flowers, a woman long out of the news with whom Clinton's husband once had an extramarital affair, isn't much of a counterpart to Cuban, an outspoken Trump critic. No, she serves a different purpose in Trump's view of the universe.

Flowers' presence would, in Trump's eyes, shame Clinton for her husband's infidelity. It's a view the real estate mogul has pushed for decades: If a woman's husband is unfaithful, it is always the woman who is to blame.

If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2016

Anyone who's ever had a tough time in a marriage should recognize what Trump is doing. It's the same shame with which he smeared his first two wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, after he cheated on and then divorced them.

As Trump wrote of his first wife, "My big mistake with Ivana was taking her out of the role of wife and allowing her to run one of my casinos in Atlantic City. ... I soon began to realize that I was married to a business person rather than a wife."

Those two concepts are seemingly incompatible to Trump. A woman cannot be both a spouse and a professional. Women are either good wives, or they have full-time jobs, which for him means they're bad wives. And if you're a bad wife, he believes, you deserve to be betrayed and left.

Remember Trump's dig at HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington? He called her "unattractive inside and out," adding, "I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man."

That he makes an exception for the daughter who is slated to carry on his own legacy does not erase how he has spoken about other women.

Trump also resents the fact that anyone would sympathize with a woman whose husband left her for another woman. As his affair with Maples was playing out in the press in 1990, he expressed his irritation to Vanity Fair. "When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass - a good one! - there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left," he said.

It's as if Trump were unable to comprehend why anyone would sympathize with a person whose spouse left her for someone else. For him, a cheating husband merely proves that a woman has failed at her most important job: keeping her husband happy.

And if a woman can't succeed at her most important job, this means to Trump that she can't be trusted to do any other job either. In this case, the job is president of the United States.

Trump said as much himself in 2015, sharing this tweet with his millions of followers:

But Trump's transparent ploy to shame Clinton could backfire with the very group of voters that he needs to win the presidency: white, married, suburban women.

Hillary Clinton is a white, married woman who lives in suburban Chappaqua, New York, and who has stayed with her husband for more than 40 years, through good times and bad. By humiliating her, Trump insults the life choices that many female voters hold dear: keeping their marriages strong, raising their children and pursuing their careers.

For Trump, that is a very bad idea.

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