Ana Navarro doesn’t think former President Bill Clinton would’ve remained in office if his scandal with Monica Lewinsky had occurred after the #MeToo movement.
On this morning’s episode of The View, Navarro speculated that—with the exception of President Donald Trump—an affair with a young impressionable intern would’ve been enough to kick Clinton out of the White House had it happened after 2017 and not in the 1990s.
“I think that if the Monica scandal, the Clinton scandal with Monica, had occurred after the #MeToo movement, he probably would’ve been impeached,” Navarro said. “I think we see things in a different light. And by ‘we,’ I mean people who don’t follow Donald Trump because they don’t see anything.”
Navarro added, “But most of the people who did listen to women, who took the #MeToo movement to heart, I include myself in that — I see things differently today than I did when the Bill Clinton thing happened.”:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(999x0:1001x2)/monica-bill2-2000-0ee36a23ad834960897ef2fbc8362e06.jpg)
Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky—which was publicly outed in 1998—came two decades before the #MeToo movement, which found women survivors speaking out against their sexual abusers and harassers in numbers. While the social movement was founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, it gained global popularity in 2017 when the sexual assault allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein started to come out.
According to Navarro, Clinton—who was impeached over the scandal, but ultimately acquitted and permitted to remain in office—many were willing to overlook the inappropriateness of his affair at the time because he was a generally liked man.
“I think because we like Bill Clinton, because he’s charismatic, because so many people think he was a good president, I think people were willing to give him a pass,” Navarro said. “But I think he would’ve been judged differently after #MeToo — unless he was Donald Trump and a Republican.”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.
