Is Donald Trump’s campaign over?
The
Republican nominee’s talk of sexually preying on women makes
Romney’s ’47 percent’ tape seem like a high-minded Great
Courses lecture.
By GLENN THRUSH AND
KATIE GLUECK 10/8/16, 9:40 AM CET Updated 10/8/16, 2:30 PM CET
It’s fitting that
the election of Hillary Clinton as the first female president might
have been sealed by Donald Trump’s treatment of women as
subordinate, interchangeable, pliable playthings.
Trump — a
compulsively public politician who has mouthed some of the most
hilarious (intentionally or otherwise), offensive, fact-allergic and
misogynistic statements by anyone competing in the public arena —
might be ultimately undone by a private admission about a woman he
wanted to have sex with.
There has never been
a major party nominee like Trump, and there has never been anything
like the release of Trump speaking about women in the most vulgar and
demeaning terms in a 2005 hot mic recording — including the
nauseating admissions that he made an apparently unwanted pass on a
married woman and that he liked to grope the women he courted whether
they liked it or not.
Americans don’t
trust politicians (it’s one of the biggest reasons for Trump’s
improbable rise), but they trust their eyes and ears. And the
recording of Trump talking with radio and TV host Billy Bush makes a
starker case that he’s unsuited to occupy the nation’s highest
office — rendering Mitt Romney’s infamous leaked “47 percent”
tape seem like a high-minded Great Courses lecture.
That disclosure in
September 2012, polls showed, had a significant impact on the race —
but this exponentially uglier exchange has the potential to plunge
Trump, already reeling in the polls, into a final death spiral by
alienating his female supporters, undecided voters and
hold-your-nose-and-vote Trump mainstream conservatives, Democratic
and Republican operatives told POLITICO.
Some Republicans saw
Friday’s avalanche of disclosures — coming after a week of
self-defeating missteps and message confusion — as Trump’s coup
de grace.
“There’s no path
for him electorally,” said Rick Tyler, former communications
director for Ted Cruz, the senator who offered Trump a late-in
the-game endorsement after refusing to do so at the party’s
convention in Cleveland. “Now amazing things can happen, and they
have, but the trajectory he’s on, he has no path, and if he has
another bad debate on Sunday — well, there’s just no way he can
afford another bad debate.”
Added Karen Fesler,
an Iowa conservative activist who still supports Trump: “He does
not make it easy to support him.” When asked if she was still
backing him, she replied, “I’m Never Hillary.”
The mainstream
Republican leadership, which engaged in months of external
introspection over whether or not to endorse a man whose candidacy
they privately deplored, renounced him with the venom of pent-up
resentment 48 hours before his high-stakes second debate with
Clinton. House Speaker Paul Ryan scrapped a joint appearance with
Trump in Wisconsin this weekend, and Senator John McCain, who said
he’d voted for a man who cruelly ridiculed his imprisonment in
North Vietnam declared, “No woman should ever be victimized by this
kind of inappropriate behavior. He alone bears the burden of his
conduct and alone should suffer the consequences” — without
defining what those consequences should be.
The most immediate
impact of the audiotape: Panic by down-ballot Republicans who
scampered to denounce Trump as Democrats pounced. One of the most
forceful defections came from the maverick Republican congressman
from Utah, Jason Chaffetz, who told CNN, “That was an apology for
getting caught,” while also declaring, “I’m out!”
The tape revelations
prompted the release of other, more disturbing allegations of
sexually predatory behavior. Late Friday, New York Times columnist
Nicholas Kristof detailed another case of what he called “groping”
by Trump, reporting that the developer had laid hands on a dinner
party guest in the presence of her husband in 1992. “I didn’t
know how to handle it,” the woman told Kristof. “I would go away
from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape
route.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett
related a more recent example of purported lechery: In 2010, Trump
invited a friend of hers into his Trump Tower office and made an
unwelcome, unexpected pass. “That’s exactly what Trump did to
me,” she told Burnett. “Trump took Tic Tacs, suggested that I
take them also. He then leaned in … catching me off guard and
kissed me almost on the lips. I was really freaked out.”
There have been few
genuine knock-out blows in recent elections — the last big one was
the revelation that George McGovern’s 1972 running mate Thomas
Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatments for depression, which
prompted his removal from the ticket.
“I don’t know
how you recover from something like that” — Alfonso Aguilar,
president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles
But some Republicans
saw Friday’s avalanche of disclosures — coming after a week of
self-defeating missteps and message confusion — as Trump’s coup
de grace.
One Republican state
chairman who has previously said he is backing his party’s
standard-bearer, says his own wife, a “staunch Republican,” is
now considering the unthinkable — voting for Clinton, something he
noted other women across the country are considering, especially
following Friday’s audio release.
“That knocking
sound you hear is that final nail entering Trump’s coffin,” the
official said. “The Republican Party nominee has effectively mocked
his own marriage and suggested sexual assault. It’s just so beyond
indefensible, I just really don’t have any words. I don’t know
how anyone can defend this.”
It’s a “smoking
gun” confirming he’s a hardcore misogynist and not just a benign,
politically incorrect playboy, the chairman added, echoing an
increasingly commonly held opinion that the seemingly
self-destructive candidate had finally destroyed himself.
“I don’t know
how you recover from something like that,” said Alfonso Aguilar,
the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles,
who had supported Trump before abandoning him last month after the
nominee gave a particularly harsh immigration speech. “But I think
all Republicans must come out now and denounce him forcefully and
call on him to withdraw. He cannot remain the party standard-bearer
after those comments.”
Several pro-Trump
pastors took to social media to defend their man — even after he
was captured on tape boasting about his efforts to bed a married
woman, speaking months after he married his third wife Melania. But
the conservative blogger Erick Erickson, an evangelical Christian,
says he thinks this particular revelation is of the end-times
variety.
“This morning,
polling showed 40 percent of Protestant pastors in the U.S. were
undecided in 2016,” he Tweeted late Friday. “Probably much less
than that tonight.”
“These words don’t
reflect who I am. I said it. I was wrong, and I apologize” —
Donald Trump
Defiance is no
longer a luxury the brash candidate can afford, not after his
unimpressive showing in the first debate – and subsequent rants,
which included a defense of comments he made about the weight of a
former Miss Universe. Trump, who has breezily dismissed controversies
in the past by issuing blanket denials, counter-attacking or mocking
reporters seems, at long last, to have grasped the perils of
non-contrition. His statement, an hour after the Washington Post
broke the story, began with a shot at Bill Clinton but transitioned
into the rarest of Trump expressions — an apology, of sorts.
“I apologize if
anyone was offended,” Trump said in a statement, referring to his
saltier comments (“I grab [women] by the pussy,” he told Bush) as
locker room banter.
Later, he released a
videotaped mea culpa that was less than full-throated. “I never
said I’m a perfect person nor pretended to be someone I’m not,”
Trump said. “I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words
released today on this more than decade-old video are one of them.
These words don’t reflect who I am. I said it. I was wrong, and I
apologize.”
Donald Trump is
joined on stage by his wife Melania Trump after delivering his
acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention in July
| Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
But he quickly
reverted to his familiar, brash, attacking-is-defending approach.
“I’ve said some
foolish things, but there is a big difference between the words and
actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and
Hillary has bullied, attacked, intimidated and shamed his victims,”
he added. “We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at
the debate on Sunday.”
Trump, a branding
whiz with an intuitive understanding of pop culture, gets why this
controversy is bigger and more dangerous than the dozens of quotidian
outrages he’s been accused of during a year-and-a-half of open-mic
campaigning, people in his orbit said.
“An actual tape is
different,” a Republican ally of Trump’s told POLITICO. “It’s
got his voice. That makes a difference.”
Saul Anuzis, former
chair of the Michigan Republican party and a former Cruz campaign
adviser who is still supporting Trump, said, “It will probably have
a negative effect, at least in the short term. The question is, is it
a sustaining damage? That’s hard to say. It’s unfortunate, it’s
embarrassing, you wish it weren’t out there, but I don’t think
it’s necessarily disqualifying.”
Austin Barbour, a
prominent Mississippi-based Republican operative, said Trump could
survive — but added that the damage inflicted was simply too much
to overcome for key parts of his base.
“Oh, it matters.
But how much does it matter?” Barbour asked. “This hurts him with
… independent women, undecided women, of course it hurts him,
everyone knows that. When you look in states like Mississippi or
North Carolina or the panhandle of Florida, central Pennsylvania,
really conservative areas, I think it hurts him with white seniors,
one- or two-time, particularly two-time a week churchgoers,
particularly ones in rural areas. They’re the ones going to be the
most turned off by this. They’re not going to vote for Hillary at
all, they despise Hillary, but this is going to be too much for them
to take.
“They are his
base, but there’s going to be some percentage of them, I don’t
know what it is, that he’s going to lose their support.”
For Clinton, who has
spent much of the campaign being lashed by Trump and the media over
her email scandal, the last week has been one of the few enjoyable
stretches of a campaign that even her closest aides describe as a
draining ordeal. And on Friday, they expressed a sense of vindication
— and poetic justice — that a womanizing bully was being humbled
by the women he’s humiliated.
One giddy Clinton
ally — taking a moment from fretting about the largely overshadowed
release of internal campaign emails by WikiLeaks — put it this way:
“This is what we call irony.… A guy who really loves f—ing, you
know, he basically just f—ed himself out of the race.”
Authors:
Glenn Thrush and
Katie Glueck
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