Donald
Trump attacks 'biased' Lester Holt and accuses Google of conspiracy
The
Republican nominee lashes out in the wake of his poor debate showing
and hints at more attacks on the Clinton marriage
Ben Jacobs in
Washington DC
@Bencjacobs
Thursday 29
September 2016 04.58 BST
Donald Trump has
gone on the offensive after his underwhelming debate performance by
criticizing debate moderator Lester Holt as biased and accusing
Google of a conspiracy to rig search results in favor of Hillary
Clinton.
He also had
surrogates attack his Democrat rival for her husband’s infidelities
while suggesting she wants to “strip [the United States] of its
status as a sovereign nation”.
The Republican
nominee launched the latest salvo of attacks in an interview with Fox
News’s Bill O’Reilly where he claimed Holt “was much, much
tougher on me than he was on Hillary”. Trump said that while
initially “I said good things right after the show” he had
changed his mind about Holt’s performance “after seeing the way
he badgered and even the questions I got”.
In particular, Trump
expressed his discontent over the fact that Holt asked him “the
birther question” in Monday’s debate. The Republican nominee had
long falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the
United States, an accusation widely considered to be a racist
dogwhistle. Although Trump only recently acknowledged that Obama was
born in the United States in an event at a Washington hotel, he
falsely blamed Hillary Clinton for the conspiracy theory’s origin.
He since said that he only acknowledged Obama’s actual birthplace
in order to “get on with the campaign”.
Trump also
introduced a new conspiracy theory to the campaign on Wednesday night
when he accused Google of somehow colluding with Hillary Clinton’s
campaign. “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about
Hillary Clinton,” the Republican told a cheering crowd of
supporters in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Neither Google nor the Trump
campaign responded to requests for comment on this accusation, which
seems to stem from a report in Sputnik News, a Russian state
propaganda outlet. The reference to Google did not appear to be ad
libbed as it was in Trump’s prepared remarks.
Also, at the rally,
Trump unveiled a new accusation towards Clinton, whom he has
repeatedly attacked as “a globalist”, by saying she was a “vessel
for special interests ... who want to strip [the United States] of
its status as a sovereign nation”. Although the former secretary of
state has long favored immigration reform as well as number of free
trade agreements, there is no evidence that she has ever supported
stripping the United States of its sovereignty.
However, Clinton is
facing scrutiny over her complicated marital history. After Trump
publicly congratulated himself for not bringing up former President
Bill Clinton’s past infidelities in Monday’s debate, his campaign
has cited them in talking points in an attempt to rebut past crude
statements about a beauty queen.
The statements about
former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, which included calling her “Miss
Piggy” for her weight and “Miss Housekeeping” in reference to
her Hispanic heritage, were brought up by Hillary Clinton in Monday’s
debate. Trump owned part of the Miss Universe pageant at the time.
In talking points
distributed to Trump surrogates on the topic, they were told to
change the topic to Monica Lewinsky and included the line “Mr Trump
has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did
when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers.” In
interviews on Wednesday, Trump surrogates repeatedly brought the
subject up. Trump himself tried to cast himself as an ally of Machado
in an interview with O’Reilly. He repeatedly said “I saved her
job” and added in seeming regret: “I helped somebody and this is
what you get for helping somebody.”
Clinton spent the
day campaigning with former rival Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire.
The two tried to appeal to millennial voters by repeatedly touting
Clinton’s proposal to reduce the cost of college tuition. Clinton
is facing declining enthusiasm among millennial voters who were one
of the key groups in the winning coalition forged by Obama in his
election victories. According to a recent poll conducted by
ABC/Washington Post only 49% of voters under the age of 40 said they
were likely to vote in November. A similar poll in 2012 put that
number at 71%. The Democratic nominee also held two fundraisers on
Wednesday, one of which featured an appearance from Massachusetts
senator and progressive, Elizabeth Warren.
The leading third
party alternative to Clinton and Trump suffered his own embarrassment
on Wednesday. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee for the White
House, was unable to name a single foreign leader he admired in an
interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. He referred to his inability
to come up with a single name as “another Aleppo moment.” This
was a reference to a televised interview several weeks ago when the
former two-term governor of New Mexico came up empty when asked “what
is Aleppo?” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Johnson seemed unaware of the
Syrian city which has been long under siege in the midst of that
country’s civil war and the site of numerous atrocities by the
Assad regime and its allies.
The candidates will
return to the campaign trail on Thursday by meeting voters in states
that they are long familiar with from the primaries. Clinton is
holding an event in Iowa while Trump returns to the trail in New
Hampshire.
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