He will be critiquing a woman for doing the right thing, for standing by her man, for loyalty, for resilience.

Bill Clinton was the one in the wrong in that affair, not Hillary Clinton. In terms of preparedness for presidency, nothing prepares you for stress like staying loyal to a philandering husband.

Why do I support her for this? Shouldn't a feminist renounce a woman who stood by her man instead of standing up for herself?

The answer is no. Here's why.

Hillary Clinton's behaviour is admirable for so many reasons. When she decided not to leave Bill after the news of his affairs, she displayed key personal attributes that Trump doesn't appear to have. While Clinton stayed faithful and stayed schtum, Trump divorced two wives and invited everyone to his degraded world view of wives and marriage. Both a good marriage and a good divorce require respect for the other party. Only one of these candidates has managed to display that.

There are several personal qualities that Hillary Clinton has displayed that stand her in good stead for her role as president: forbearance and fidelity, of course, but also loyalty and most importantly, resilience. Clinton showed those personal qualities while subjected to one of the greatest stresses of all – public humiliation.

Tanya Buhler Corbin is an associate professor of political science at Radford University, which she describes as being deep in rural Appalachia, Trump Country. She teaches leadership (this semester, she's teaching American Presidency) and focuses her research on the resilience that emerges after crises and disasters; and she says all those lessons apply to Clinton's candidacy for president.

She says: "I don't know of any other politician who has had this length career with this many setbacks in politics, who has endured the level of attack, criticism, setbacks, investigations and truly bounce back from all of it. That is really the definition of resilience.

"That's important because you will have nothing but storms to weather as a president. Every day is a storm. You have to recover and recalibrate and repair."

Resilience. It is a ubiquitous term right now. But as Corbin puts it, we can think about resilience in political terms in just the same way we think about it in terms of disasters.

"We try to build mitigation and preparedness, we think about building a network of social capital."

Clinton is already president of social capital, and for her, relationships are not disposable. They are the product of emotional labour over years and an investment in the future. Bill Clinton has been unbearably open about his philandering. And she has soldiered on. As Corbin says, Hillary Clinton would have been criticised for disloyalty had she not stood by her man. Now Trump is trying to criticise her for loyalty, for her resilience.

"Trump is using 'your husband is a cheater' but the irony is that Donald Trump is a cheater, she says. "Your relationships and your loyalty are everything in your career, making good on your promises."

Even your wedding promise.

The criticism by Trump and others is that Clinton enabled her husband's affairs. But as Katha Pollitt said in The New York Times earlier this year: "What is enabling, anyway? We used to call it by other names: love, loyalty, credulousness, naivete, practicality, forgiveness, saving the marriage, protecting the children, just getting on with life. "

Amie Parnes, who wrote The New York Times bestseller HRC with Jonathan Allan, has noted the style of Clinton's loyalty throughout the presidential candidate's career. She's writing the sequel, due to be published during the US spring. She had another name for the original in mind before its publication in 2014.

"I wanted to call it 'The Phoenix' because she falls and rebuilds and falls and rebuilds and comes back stronger than ever.

"Resiliency is one of the key traits of Hillary and she has always always bounced back.

"Trump thought he could use her as a doormat and she would take it. But she is quite the opposite. She can throw punches and she is quite the student. She is always well prepared for these kinds of situations. That's her in a nutshell, resiliency is big."

Parnes also says Clinton's loyalty extends past her husband to staffers and in particular, Huma Abedin, who is vice-chair of the Clinton campaign for president; and who has recently separated from renowned flasher Anthony Weiner. Trump has dumped so many during his brief campaign. Clinton remains loyal despite setbacks.

"It's very true that once you are in Clintonworld you never leave. You are always in that orbit in [whatever] capacity.

"That's how their aides view [the Clintons] and they expect loyalty in return, how they operate in every instance. That's true for most politicians but especially true for the Clintons."

I covered Hillary Clinton's visit to Australia in 1996 when she managed to attend both the official functions organised by then prime minister John Howard and the functions she herself had privately wrangled, a meeting with those interested in universal health care and human rights.

"We should all be able to celebrate the diversity of experiences that women are choosing for themselves today," she said at the time.

And that includes standing by your man.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax Media columnist and a lecturer at University of Technology, Sydney.