On Wednesday's Kelly File, Megyn Kelly aired an unbroadcast clip of her Tuesday interview with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom Hillary Clinton name-checked during Monday's debate and Donald Trump keeps calling fat. "You tell me whether this is good or bad that here we are on Wednesday and the country's still talking about it," Kelly asked Dana Perino, former White House press secretary under George. W Bush. "I would say that it is not good," Perino said. "It's not good for the country, and I don't think it's good for either campaign."
Hillary Clinton had obviously set a trap for Trump, Perino said, "and he had warning this was going to come. You can't plan for everything in your life," especially past things you've said, she added, but "dealing with how he's treated women in the past should not come as a surprise in the campaign against Hillary Clinton." "No, no, it should not have," Kelly said, "and I'll give you Exhibit A... in our case for the reason why Donald Trump should not have been surprised that the women issue was going to come at him." Exhibit A was Kelly's eerily similar question to Trump in a famous August 2015 GOP primary debate. "I tried to warn you," Kelly said after the clip. (To be fair to Trump, though, watch the 2015 audience's reaction to his disparagement of Rosie O'Donnell.)
Perino compared Clinton's surfacing of Machado to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004, then said that Clinton "is narrow-casting as well. It's not just women writ large that she's talking to but also Latina women in particular." "That's right, and even tonight, as the Trump campaign clearly wants to move beyond this, Newt Gingrich is out there, bringing it up again," Kelly sighed, "saying you can't gain a bunch of weight when you become Miss Universe." "Stop talking about women's weight all together," Perino said. "Stop." "You know what, if you want to increase your numbers with women, yeah, just stop telling us how fat we are?" Kelly said. "Because that, it turns out, doesn't make us feel very good. Especially when you have been classified as overweight, and we just don't want to hear it."