Trump challenges Kavanaugh accuser to prove she was attacked

President Trump on Friday for the first time called out the woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault — tweeting that she should have called the cops decades ago if the experience was so traumatic.

“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!” the president tweeted, referring to California college professor Christine Blasey Ford.

The night before, he told a Fox News host that she should have called the FBI in 1982, when she was 15 and when a plastered Kavanaugh allegedly forced her into a bedroom during a high school drinking party, pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to take her clothes off before she was able to flee.

“You say, why didn’t somebody call the FBI 36 years ago? I mean, you could also say, when did this all happen? What’s going on?” the president said, even though the FBI does not investigate such crimes, which are handled by local cops.

The comments, the first time Trump had mentioned Ford by name, came days after he told Hill TV that the nation’s top law enforcement agency was “truly a cancer in our country.”

The comments also came as Kavanaugh — who vigorously denied Ford’s accusations — appeared to be losing support among voters in the wake of the allegations.

A USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 40 percent of voters believed that Trump’s nominee to the high court should not be confirmed opposed to 31 percent who said he should be — the first time a plurality of Americans opposed a nominee since polling on the issue began.

Ford’s accusation has jarred the conservative appellate court judge’s jurist’s prospects for winning confirmation, which until the 52-year-old Ford’s emergence last week had seemed all but certain.

It has also bloomed into a broader clash over whether women alleging abuse are taken seriously by men, and how both political parties address such claims with the advent of the #MeToo movement — a theme that could echo in this November’s elections for control of Congress.

Trump’s apparent shift in strategy came as Ford’s lawyers were negotiating with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terms of her possible testimony next week, raising the prospect of a dramatic showdown over her lurid accusations.