Gutter

Trump jumps into the gutter

The Republican nominee loses all impulse control, and unleashes a violent Twitter rant against his Miss Universe nemesis.

By LOUIS NELSON

While Hillary Clinton is riding high after the first presidential debate, Donald Trump is jumping down into the gutter.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, the impulse-control-deficient Republican nominee let loose a torrent of tweets, calling former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado "disgusting" and accusing her of having a sex tape.

"Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an ‘angel’ without checking her past, which is terrible!" read one tweet sent a little after 5 a.m., followed by, "Using Alicia M in the debate as a paragon of virtue just shows that Crooked Hillary suffers from BAD JUDGEMENT! Hillary was set up by a con."

He wrapped up his rant with: "Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?"

It was his most vicious lashing out since Hillary Clinton revived his long-running feud with Machado on Monday night’s debate stage. As Trump tried to again attack Clinton’s "stamina," the Democratic nominee sprung a trap, saying one of the worst things Trump has said about a woman was his public shaming of Machado after she gained a few pounds during her reign.

"He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina," Clinton said. "Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado and she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she's going to vote this November."

Trump has since been unable to restrain himself, attacking Machado as Clinton’s camp has pushed her forcefully into the public eye, playing right into the Democratic nominee’s argument that Trump lacks the temperament and impulse control to be commander in chief.

And Clinton’s gambit is paying off. While most pundits swiftly declared Clinton the winner of Monday night’s showdown for her poised and lucid showing, a burst of polls out Thursday night and Friday morning provided the first tangible evidence that voters agreed.

A Florida poll showed Clinton with a 4-point lead over Trump (a 2-point gain since the previous survey), and polls out of New Hampshire and Michigan gave the former secretary of state 7-point leads in both of those states.

If other surveys follow suit, it will provide Clinton with some breathing space after a tense patch in which polls showed that the presidential race had tightened into a dead heat going into Monday’s faceoff.

Later Friday, Trump defended himself against political pundits who spent much of the day attacking him for the very-early morning Twitter spree, writing, "For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o'clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!"

In an Instagram post responding to Trump's attacks against her, Machado wrote in Spanish that the GOP nominee was "reviving defamations and false accusations about my life." She said that she "will keep standing, sharing my story, and my absolute support of Mrs. Clinton on behalf of all women, my sisters, aunts, grandmothers, cousins, friends and the female community."

"This, of course, is not the first time I have faced a situation like this," she added. "Through their campaign of hate, the Republican candidate tries to discredit and demoralize a woman, which is definitely one of his most terrifying features. With this, he is seeking to distract attention from his real problems and of his real incapacity to even pretend to be the leader of this great country."

Clinton's campaign jumped on Trump's Machado tweets later Friday morning, eager for yet another chance to highlight his tendency to fling derogatory remarks at women. "What kind of man stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?" Clinton posted to her Twitter account, the second in a nine-tweet flurry. "Trump obsessively bullies Rosie O'Donnell — an accomplished actor. He insulted Kim Kardashian for her weight — when she was pregnant. Pathetic," she wrote minutes later, punctuating her online attack by telling her followers that "while Donald continues day 5 of his Machado meltdown, we'll be in Florida talking about national service. You'll want to watch."

She drove home a similar message at an afternoon rally in Coral Springs, Florida, suggesting Trump's latest tirade "proves yet again that he is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander in chief." "I mean, really, who gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe? I mean, he hurled as many insults as he could. Really, why does he do things like that?" Clinton asked.

"Because he’s an idiot," one supporter shouted, though Clinton herself actually responded by calling "his latest Twitter meltdown ... unhinged, even for him."

The episode took another bizarre turn late Friday, when BuzzFeed reported that Trump himself once made a cameo — fully clothed — in a softcore porn video.

"There's been a lot of talk about sex tapes today and in a strange turn of events only one adult film has emerged today and its star is Donald Trump," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told her traveling press.

Clinton's campaign has eagerly trotted Machado out as a surrogate, hosting a conference call with the former beauty pageant winner earlier this week. On Friday, the campaign provided a readout of Clinton's call to Machado, where she thanked the former Miss Universe for her support and courage. Machado replied that she has been a longtime supporter of Clinton's and looks forward to her becoming president.

"The Clinton campaign could not have asked for more," David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist, said on CNN.

Axelrod said it is "unfathomable" that Trump made such a self-destructive move on the Friday after the debate, adding that it was a "shrewd thing" for Clinton to poke Trump on his past comments about Machado.

"They wanted to make this an issue and he is cooperating in that project," he said. "And I'm telling you, none of his advisers are telling him to do this. This is the way Donald Trump is, he's very reactive, the Clinton folks figured that out, they were pushing his buttons all throughout that debate and he is still reeling from that."

Speaking to Clinton's traveling press pool Friday morning, the former secretary of state's communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said lashing out at women after a poor debate performance has become something of a pattern for Trump, who also feuded with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly after the first Republican primary debate. She said Trump's attack against the former pageant winner is "distasteful to voters and backfires on him," adding that "It is, on some level, how he's run most of his campaign, which is to divide people."

"The resolution of the issue for him is simple. He could stop attacking her and apologize. I think that's the point of her tweets. He insulted her in real-time as Miss Universe, he did it last night, he did it two days ago. Hillary's going to stand up and defend her. And it is a pattern with him," Palmieri told reporters. "It is not apparent to us why he simply can't stop attacking her. He's had many opportunities to right the offense that she took to how she was treated 20 years ago."

The GOP nominee's early-morning flurry of tweets is made even more problematic by the fact that much of the allegations about Machado in his tweets represent a stretching of the truth at best, if not an outright falsehood. The "past" to which Trump referred in his tweets is likely an allusion to a 1998 Venezuelan murder case in which Machado was investigated, but never charged, for allegedly driving a getaway car for her then-boyfriend after he shot and wounded his brother-in-law at a memorial service. The judge in that case later accused the former Miss Universe of threatening him over the phone, an allegation she denied.

And while Trump, joined by conservative media moguls Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, has suggested that Machado has previously appeared in pornographic films, there is no evidence to suggest that that is the case. The former Miss Universe has posed nude in Playboy and appeared in risque reality TV shows, but The Daily Beast and other media outlets that have investigated claims that she appeared in pornographic videos have found those claims to be false.

His suggestion that Clinton may have helped Machado gain U.S. citizenship is also problematic. The former pageant winner told Cosmopolitan Magazine this week that she became a citizen last August specifically to vote against Trump, well after Clinton's 2013 departure from the State Department. 

Even if Clinton had still been at the State Department when Machado became a citizen, the naturalization process would have been out of her control because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles the naturalization process, is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Any influence she would have had over Machado's citizenship process would have been limited to whatever clout she maintained as a former Cabinet secretary.

Asked Friday morning if either the campaign or Clinton herself had helped Machado become a U.S. citizen, Palmieri said they had not.

Trump, in his tweetstorm on Friday morning, also continued chafing at media reports that his advisers were disappointed with his debate performance and plan to force him to aggressively practice before the next showdown on Oct. 9.

In his Twitter spree, the Manhattan billionaire warned against believing the reports.

"Anytime you see a story about me or my campaign saying ‘sources said,’ DO NOT believe it. There are no sources, they are just made up lies!" Trump tweeted a little after 3 a.m.

He followed up with another tweet at about 9 a.m., saying, "Remember, don't believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don't name the sources, the sources don't exist."

Trump’s allies in recent days have been flooding the airwaves, trying to spin his shaky performance on Monday night as a stellar one. One of the main talking points has been that Trump was a "gentleman" for not bringing up Bill Clinton’s infidelities and hasn’t gotten the credit he deserved.

"He thought about it, and I’m sure he said to himself, ‘a president of the United States shouldn’t attack somebody personally when their daughter is sitting in the audience,’" Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Thursday. "And he bit his tongue, and he was a gentleman, and I thought in many ways that was the most important moment of the whole evening. He proved that he had the discipline to remain as a decent guy even when she was disgusting."

Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway also lamented that the billionaire has gotten short-changed.

"I thought he was a complete gentleman to her and he hasn't gotten a lot of credit for that," Conway said on "The View" during a brutal discussion with the hosts, who piled on, challenging Conway’s defenses of Trump.

At one point, Whoopi Goldberg even shot back at Conway, "Kellyanne, honey, I’m a New Yorker. Don't B.S. a B.S.-er."

Conway, throughout the interview, tried to thread the needle of justifying Trump’s campaign, even while not fully endorsing some of his actions, including the threats to go after Bill Clinton’s sex scandals from the 1990s.

"I'm not advising him to go there," Conway said, while adding, "it's fair game to think about how Hillary Clinton treated those women after the fact."