Donald
Trump marches on amid spiraling disaster of Republican party
desertion
At
rally on Monday, Republican nominee praises WikiLeaks and repeats
Russian propaganda site’s attack on Hillary Clinton
Ed Pilkington in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and Lauren Gambino
Tuesday 11 October
2016 07.05 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/11/trump-spiralling-disaster-desertion-wikileaks-russia
A pumped-up Donald
Trump strutted in front of a crowd of die-hard supporters in
Pennsylvania on Monday night, throwing aside a spiraling disaster of
the groping tape, Republican defections and his plummeting poll
ratings.
The Republican
presidential nominee made no reference at a rally in the old
coalmining town of Wilkes-Barre to the catastrophic 72 hours his
campaign has endured since an 11-year old recording was released in
which he bragged about using his celebrity status to sexually assault
women.
Nor did he refer to
the many members of his party who abandoned him publicly over the
weekend in protest at his offensive comments, or to the dramatic
headway made by his Democratic rival in the polls.
Instead, he fired up
his loyal army of followers by repeating the threat he made directly
to Hillary Clinton’s face at the second presidential debate on
Sunday night that once ensconced in the White House he would appoint
a special prosecutor to investigate her alleged crimes.
When the baying
crowd at Mohegan Sun Arena shouted “Lock her up!”, Trump shot
back at them: “Lock her up is right!”
But in his
effervescent post-debate mood he merely succeeded in generating
further controversy. He praised the open-information group that acted
as conduit for one of the biggest leaks of US government secrets in
history: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he said.
And he also managed
to adopt an erroneous report by a Russian government-sponsored news
agency relating to a recent WikiLeaks stash of documents hacked from
the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Trump, reading from
an account of the document dump, told his supporters at the
Wilkes-Barre rally that Clinton’s long-time adviser Sidney
Blumenthal – “Sleazy Sidney” as he called him – had sent an
email to Podesta in which Blumenthal said it was legitimate to
question whether Clinton had failed to protect American personnel in
Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, when she was US secretary of state.
“In other words,
[Blumenthal’s] now admitting they could have done something about
Benghazi,” Trump said, prompting loud reproaches from the crowd.
In fact, the claim
that Clinton had something to answer for over the death of the US
ambassador in Benghazi was made by a Newsweek journalist in an
article that Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta, as the author of the
magazine piece promptly pointed out. The conflation of the Newsweek
quotes and Blumenthal appears to have been extracted by Trump from an
inaccurate account of the WikiLeaks documents reported by the Russian
online news outlet Sputnik.
The botched attack
on Clinton and Blumenthal could backfire for Trump given that he has
already been accused by his Democratic rival of being overly
complimentary about the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Last Friday
the Obama administration suggested that the WikiLeaks documents had
been hacked from Democrats’ email accounts by the Russian
government in an attempt to sway the US presidential election.
Though Trump avoided
talking about the groping tape in Wilkes-Barre, at an earlier rally
in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, he did renew his line of defence that his
2005 bragging about being able to kiss and grab the genitals of women
was only “locker room talk”. One of his leading surrogates, the
former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, went further by turning the
issue into a joke.
During a warm-up
speech at the Wilkes-Barre rally, Giuliani made a quip about it
during an attack on Clinton. He said: “Boy, she is as phony as …
I better not say, as I have to be nice. I might say it back in the
locker room.”
In his Wilkes-Barre
speech, Trump pressed all the familiar buttons that have by now
become a mainstay of his insurrectionary campaign. He promised to
build a wall along the southern border and have the Mexicans pay for
it, to bring jobs back to America from overseas, and to cut taxes and
government regulation.
The candidate’s
braggadocio was clearly tailored to suit the tastes of his hardcore
supporters, most of whom dismissed concern about the NBC tape as so
much political correctness. The Republican candidate also appeared to
believe that his openly hostile stance towards Clinton in the
presidential debate – in which he threatened her with jail,
interrupted her and jabbed his fingers at her multiple times, and
stood ominously behind her when she was talking – had put the
calamity of the groping scandal behind him.
But no matter how
much he succeeded in firing up his base of dedicated Trumpistas, the
reality TV star could not erase the fact that outside the hothouse
atmosphere of the Mohegan Sun Arena, his campaign remains in
considerable trouble. As a signal of the profound unease that his
candidacy has generated among senior Republicans, the speaker of the
House, Paul Ryan, effectively dumped Trump, telling congressional
colleagues that he would neither defend his party’s nominee nor
campaign with him.
One of the first
opinion polls to have been conducted since the groping bombshell gave
Clinton an 11-point lead nationally over her rival. The NBC News /
Wall Street Journal survey put Clinton on 46% to Trump’s 35%.
There was also
evidence that Clinton is solidifying her lead in key swing states
such as Ohio, which has voted for the winning candidate in every
presidential race since 1964. Clinton travelled to Ohio on Monday to
press home that advantage, and later this week President Obama will
wade in on her behalf in Cleveland and the state capital Columbus.
It came as John
McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for US president, was forced to
publicly account for the decision to abandon Trump.
“Why now?” the
Arizona senator was asked during a debate with his Democratic
challenger, with the moderator noting the litany of incendiary
remarks Trump has made against Mexicans, Muslims, prisoners of war, a
disabled journalist, a Gold Star military family and a Hispanic
judge, alongside a decades-long record of offensive comments about
women.
Earlier in his
campaign, Trump also taunted McCain for having been a prisoner of
war, telling an audience he preferred “people that weren’t
captured”.
“If someone wants
to say something disparaging of me, I understand that,” McCain said
during Arizona’s senate debate. “I spoke out strongly on several
other issues where I thought Mr Trump was absolutely wrong. I’ve
not been shy about it.
“When Mr Trump
attacks women and demeans the women in our nation and our society,
that is a point where I just have to part company. It’s not
pleasant for me to renounce the nominee of my party.”
Over the weekend,
McCain released a statement declaring it “impossible to continue to
offer even conditional support” to Trump and said he and his wife,
Cindy McCain, will instead write in the name of “some good
conservative Republican who is qualified to be president”. On
Monday night, McCain said this was likely to be South Carolina
senator Lindsey Graham, who dropped out of the presidential race in
December last year: “He’s an old, good friend of mine and a lot
of people like him.”
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