Bitter and soda...

Trump turns bitter

The Republican nominee, sinking in the polls, lashes out at the dishonest media, a partisan debate commission, and a GOP establishment out to get him.

By Nolan D. McCaskill

A bitter Donald Trump on Wednesday ratcheted up his accusations about a rigged system designed to coronate Hillary Clinton, blaming a corrupt Democratic nominee, a dishonest media, a partisan debate commission, an unjust justice system and a Republican establishment that’s in on it all.

Trump also offered a glimpse into his potential administration, a reign that would jail Clinton and the law firm that helped delete emails from her private server and would include an investigation into the “phony” Justice Department investigation that ultimately cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.

But Trump signaled that such things are unlikely to happen — not because that’s not how the federal government operates — but because the political establishment is working to elect Clinton over him.

“Look, we’re in a rigged system, folks. This is a rigged, rigged system,” Trump said Wednesday during an afternoon rally in Ocala, Florida.

“After getting a subpoena to give over your emails and lots of other things, she deleted the emails. She has to go to jail,” he declared at his second rally in Lakeland, Florida, prompting supporters to chant “lock her up!” “And her law firm, which is a very big and powerful law firm, which is the one that said oh, they’ll determine what they’re giving, those representatives within that law firm that did that have to go to jail.”

The real estate mogul lamented Republicans and Democrats in Congress for not doing enough. He recommended that the next Congress pass a bill to address Clinton’s email scandal. Simply put, he added, he’s embarrassed that Congress has allowed Clinton to run for president after committing “crime at the highest level.”

“I don’t know. Do they make a deal where everybody protects each other in Washington?” Trump mused. “Maybe that’s it. I really believe it. I really believe it. I almost say, ‘Listen, we’re gonna leave you alone, but when it’s our turn you have to leave them alone.’ Do they make deals like this? This is the most heinous, the most serious thing that I’ve ever seen involving justice in the United States in the history of the United States.”

But Trump heavily focused on “this WikiLeaks stuff,” which he said “is unbelievable.” He hammered the document dumps of hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal email account at both of his campaign stops.

“It tells you the inner heart. You gotta read it, and you gotta maybe get to it because they’re not putting it out,” he said, blaming the press for not reporting on enough on the hack. “They wanna put it out, but they can’t do that because without the media and without the press, Hillary Clinton would be nothing. She’d be nothing. Zero.”

Trump repeatedly seized on the contents of some of the most potentially “election-changing” emails revealed within the thousands of documents, such as exchanges talking about Catholics and evangelicals, showing a CNN contributor and Democratic National Committee staffer giving Clinton a heads-up on questions ahead of a CNN event and communicating with DOJ amid its investigation into Clinton’s email practices to, Trump alleged, give the campaign time to produce a cover-up.

“They must be dying watching this, but, you know what, they know it’s OK because they know it’s not gonna be properly reported,” Trump said of the Clinton campaign.
Nevertheless, he used the emails to overshadow his own controversy, a damaging videotape of Trump in 2005 making incredibly crude comments about sexually assaulting women with impunity because of his celebrity. The leaked tape has sunk Trump’s poll numbers and sparked an exodus of support from more than two dozen establishment Republicans.

He didn’t accept any responsibility for his flailing campaign, though. Rather, he attacked Republicans who abandoned him after he “annihilate[d] the enemy the other day,” referring to a promising debate performance last Sunday in St. Louis.

Trump claimed the Commission on Presidential Debates slants left because a co-chair worked in Bill Clinton’s White House. The other co-chair, however, is a former Republican National Committee chairman. He blamed the commission for a faulty microphone that he maintained it knew needed to be fixed.

And he expressed frustration that his party no longer has his back, telling supporters he’s at “a massive disadvantage” because “leaders” have some type of “sinister deal” going on.

“You’d think that they’d say: ‘Great going, Don. Let’s go. Let’s beat this crook. She’s a crook. Let’s beat her. We gotta stop it,’” Trump said, stressing that House Speaker Paul Ryan specifically failed to do that. “There’s a whole deal going on there. I mean, you know, there’s a whole deal going on. We’re gonna figure it out. I always figure things out. But there’s a whole sinister deal going on.”

But Trump consistently steered the conversation back to the series of WikiLeaks dumps, hoping to drive down Clinton's poll standing like the “Access Hollywood” tape has hurt his own campaign and relishing his ability to do so.

“One of the big advantages of me having a rather large microphone, meaning a lot of people are listening, is that I can talk about WikiLeaks and look, it’s on all the television networks live. We’re live,” Trump boasted, although Fox News was the only network carrying his earlier rally live at the time.

Clinton’s campaign has refused to acknowledge the authenticity of hacks, which the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are investigating and that Clinton’s campaign believes is a move by the Russians to control the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election.

While Trump repeatedly touted the information disclosed by the WikiLeaks dumps and blasted the press for not writing about them, the GOP nominee suggested he has no ties to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

“We’re being hacked because we have people that don’t know what they’re doing,” Trump said. “But they always blame Russia. And then they say, ‘Donald Trump is friends with Putin.’ I don’t know Putin, folks. I promise I don’t know Putin. What the hell do I have to do with Putin?”

With less than four weeks until Election Day and an extended deadline for Florida voter registration, Trump urged his supporters to get registered — even during his rally, if necessary. “If you’re not registered, get the hell out of here, OK?” he joked.

He cast the revelations within the WikiLeaks hack as an example of “just how much is at stake in November and how unattractive and dishonest our country has become.”

“The election of Hillary Clinton would lead, in my opinion, to the almost total destruction of our country as we know it,” he continued. “She would be the most dishonest and the most corrupt person ever elected to high office, and I don’t think it would be close.”

But with the continual WikiLeaks email dumps and Trump’s focus on its contents, the real estate mogul was optimistic about his White House chances.

“Do you believe the last 10 days, five to six of these a day?” he said. “I may be limping over the finish line, but we’re gonna get that sucker.”