Shorter leash

Trump gnaws at shorter leash

The Republican nominee strays from the teleprompter as he makes a passionate case for his candidacy. 

By Eli Stokols

Donald Trump, after several straight days delivering a more scripted message, loosened the rhetorical shackles tightened by his new campaign manager and went off-script several times Wednesday afternoon, offering a more passionate but at times self-contradicting case for his candidacy.

The Republican nominee, still struggling to right his campaign after a prolonged dip in the polls, touted the same divisive policy ideas while promising an “end to the era of division.” He hailed himself as a political outsider, citing his decades as an insider who used his money to buy power. And he offered voters a black-and-white choice between the abject dystopia to come in a Clinton presidency or the problem-free paradise he vowed to easily restore.

"If I don't win, it will be worse than ever before,” he told supporters at a Tampa, Florida, rally. “But if I win, we're going to turn it around and it will be a beautiful thing."

Trump made the same overt appeals to Hispanics and blacks, constituencies that appear to have broadly written him off, as he first did last week. But he again based his sales pitch on a patronizing portrayal of black and Hispanic communities heavy on hyperbole and stereotypes.

“I say to the African-American parent, you have a right to walk down the street of your city without having your child or yourself shot, and that’s what’s happening right now,” Trump said. “To the Hispanic parent, you have a right to walk outside without being shot; you have a right to good education for your child. You have a right to have a good job.”

As he was appealing to Hispanic voters, he twice referred to the “drugs coming in” from Mexico, even rehashing the vision of a porous border he first described in his campaign announcement speech 14 months ago.

“Bad, bad things are going to be happening with these people pouring into our country,” Trump said. He continued to hint that he might soften some of his immigration policy ideas, but then offered the same applause line to supporters and promised to build a border wall and tighten screenings on legal immigrants.

“We’re going to build a wall, don’t worry about it,” Trump said. “We’re going to build the wall and Mexico is going to pay for it, 100 percent. And it’s going to be a big wall. It’s going to be a real wall. It’s going to be as beautiful as a wall can be, but it’s going to be a real wall.”

The few thousand supporters gathered inside the Tampa rally cheered loudly.

"We are going to keep terrorists the hell out of our country,” Trump said near the end of his remarks. “And finally, we are going to create a more inclusive society."

During the hourlong rally, in which Trump veered from the teleprompter to his own ad-libbed lines and asides, there was no escaping the many incongruities — and the mammoth challenge facing his revamped campaign over the final 76 days of the election as it attempts to retain the fiery iconoclast who struck so deep a nerve with the conservative base while somehow presenting a kinder, gentler persona who might appeal more broadly to the general electorate.

Citing a new Associated Press report about Clinton Foundation donors Hillary Clinton met with while serving as secretary of state, Trump slammed the Democratic nominee over “pay to play” allegations — but, unable to leave it there, he continued to question her physical stamina based on a conservative media trope that could backfire with the female voters he so desperately needs to win over.

News this week of the FBI discovering another 15,000 of Clinton’s emails and a subsequent report that she met with dozens of Clinton Foundation donors while serving as secretary of state has given Trump, after weeks of self-inflicted political wounds, an opportunity to put his opponent on the defensive. And he hammered away at her, sketching a devastating portrait of an alleged “pay to play” controversy despite no evidence having emerged as of yet to prove it beyond the meetings themselves. In Trump’s framing, it’s only a matter of time.

“She sold favor and access in exchange for cash. And wait till you see when it’s revealed — now it looks like it’s 50 percent of the people who see her, had to make contributions — wait till you see what she did for those people,” he said. “These are not people who go in and say, ‘How are you feeling?’ believe me.

“It’s impossible to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” he continued reading from the teleprompter, before dropping in another unproven assertion.

“And then she lied to Congress. She lied to Congress 100 percent — everybody agrees — and it takes so long for them to act,” he said.

In attacking Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, Trump flubbed a line in the teleprompter, saying it was “pre-medicated” instead of “premeditated” as was scripted.

"Premeditation," Trump corrected himself before he paused. "Could be the first one was right, actually.

"You know? I might like the first way better. Pre-medication, that's a very —"

"Pre-medication! I think I like it," Trump said, giving his audience time to digest that he’d just turned a mistake into a spontaneous, not-too-subtle inference that Clinton is in poor health.

"Wow. All right. Premeditation,” he continued. "I love that," continuing on his regularly scripted speech.

He also directly referenced Clinton’s lack of “stamina” in asserting that she would take the votes of Hispanics and African-Americans for granted.

“Once she gets your votes, you know what she does? Bye, bye, folks,” Trump said. “You know what? The truth: She doesn’t have the stamina to do it, even if she wanted to.”