From the beginning, Donald Trump was unplugged.
If anyone couldn’t countenance his insults — “low-energy” Jeb Bush, “lyin’” Ted Cruz, “crooked” Hillary Clinton — he could dismiss the complaints as excesses of political correctness. He won the Republican Party’s nomination this way.
Then, Trump plugged in, finding discipline in the rigors of a TelePrompTer and family and advisers suggesting he get serious about this campaign for president if he intended to win it. Shelving the streams of consciousness which had directed his campaign rallies, he started working with a script in August — as Hillary Clinton’s post-convention “bounce” was negating what he’d gained from his convention.
Now, Trump is unshackled — freed by the many Republican Party leaders who have abandoned him amid breaking news stories about his boasts of sexual assault — to say what’s on his mind. And what’s that? The same thing he’s been saying from the start: The political system is rigged, and the media are out to get him.
As for the women who have come forward this week testifying to Trump’s sexual advances on them, Trump said at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida:
“These vicious claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false. These claims are all fabricated, they’re pure fiction, and they’re outright lies. These events never, ever happened, and the people that said them meekly, fully understand.”
On the People magazine writer who reports now that Trump grabbed her and kissed her at his Palm Beach mansion years ago, Trump had this to say about the complainant: “Take a look, you take a look… look at her. I don’t think so.”
Not hot enough to hit on. Unplugged once more.
“I can’t believe I’m saying a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” First Lady Michelle Obama said in New Hampshire, campaigning for Hillary Clinton’s election as president.
In an emotional speech, Obama spoke of the recently reported hot-mic recording in which Trump was heard bragging 11 years ago about grabbing women by their private parts and explaining that they let him do it because he’s “a star.” Trump has dismissed the recorded bragging as “locker-room banter,” and maintained in his second debate with Clinton that he didn’t do what he’d bragged about doing.
“This wasn’t just locker room banter,” Michelle Obama said. “This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turned on the TV…This is not something that we can ignore. It’s not something that we can just sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season.”
“It is cruel, and it’s frightening… It hurts… This is not normal,” she said in an anguished outpouring. “This is disgraceful and intolerable.”
It’s a sad season, for sure.
After the New York Times this week reported about two women recalling Trump’s unwanted advances against them many years ago, the Trump campaign threatened legal action against the paper which Trump calls “the failing New York Times.”
“The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation,” the Times’ deputy general counsel, David McGraw, wrote to Trump’s lawyer.
“Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women,” he wrote. “He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host’s request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a ‘piece of ass.’ Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump’s unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”
The greater question is that: What Trump has created for himself.
A worsening gender gap.
The latest Fox News poll, conducted Monday through Wednesday following the second televised presidential debate, shows Clinton leading Trump by seven points among likely voters. Since last week, Trump has lost 12 points among women 45 and older, 10 points among suburban women and seven points among white women with college degrees, Fox News reports.
A campaign that’s thrived on negativity directed by both Trump and Clinton at one another has now veered into a new dimension.
“Negativity in the past has been grounded in evidence. Exaggeration, yes. But there was a grain of truth in prior attacks,” says John Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. “Trump is now unshackled from the truth and that will give rise to unwarranted and unprecedented levels of negativity.”
“The irony is that attacks on him need not be exaggerated,” says Geer, author of “In Defense of Negativity. “They just need to use his own words.”
From the start, Trump has run on the power of personal insults.
And now that the insults are flowing in his direction, he is circling the wagons against news media reporting about an apparent legacy of personal misconduct.
Trump’s supporters are rallying around him, and against the media.
It “reminds me of what Donald Trump said during the primary, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, and that may be true,’’ David Axelrod, architect of President Barack Obama’s elections, said on CNN. “But his problem is the core voters who support him are not enough to win… What he’s employing now is a deny and attack strategy.”
Back in early September, when Trump was learning to read from a script, a CNN poll portrayed him as two points ahead of Clinton. Now that Trump has pulled the plug, the latest CNN poll — Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 — showed Clinton leading by five points in a four-way race. That’s also the average of the latest national polling.
“There is nothing the political establishment will not do — no lie that they won’t tell, to hold their prestige and power at your expense,” Trump told supporters at his rally in West Palm Beach. “And that’s what’s been happening.”
As the audience chanted a familiar refrain about Clinton — “lock her up, lock her up” — Trump replied: “Honestly, she should be locked up.”
“Let’s be clear on one thing, the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism,” Trump said. “They’re a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves. And their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them it’s a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds.”
“This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me,” Trump said. “And this will be our last chance to save it on November 8th, remember that.”
Trump insulted the Times reporters who wrote of the newest accounts and questioned the account of the People writer reporting now that forced himself on her years ago as she was reporting a story on him at his Mar-a-Lago.
“Why wasn’t it part of the story that appeared 20, or 12 years ago?” Trump asked his rally audience. “I was one of the biggest stars on television with ‘The Apprentice’ and I would’ve been one of the biggest stories of the year. Think of it, she’s doing this story on (his wife) Melania, who was pregnant at the time, and Donald Trump, our one -year anniversary, and she said I made inappropriate advances, and by the way, the area was a public area, people all over the place.”
“Take a look, you take a look,’’ he said of the writer coming forward. “Look at her, look at her words. You tell me, what you think. I don’t think so.”
“All he can do now is burn the boats,’ political strategist Mark McKinnon says of Trump’s strategy, railing against the media and resurrecting stories of Bill Clinton’s infidelities. “It may be one of the only strategies left.”
The locker room banter is unplugged, and the Trump campaign may be as well.
