With four weeks to go until election day, Donald Trump’s candidacy is diving ever lower in the polls, and the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams. Following the revelations of Trump’s trash talk and sexual assault strategies on the Access Hollywood tapes, any gains Trump made from the Clinton’s campaign stumbles have been wiped out — and this afternoon, The New York Times has broken a story of two women being groped by him, in the ’80s and in 2005. All this and more has ensured that the polls are back up to 8-12% leads in places like Virginia, Colorado and Pennsylvania, and back up to 3-5% in Florida. Once-marginal Republican states such as Arizona, Georgia and the Nebraska 2nd district are now swing states. Across the nation, Clinton’s lead after the debate was registered as high as 11 points; that has now come down to eight or so. With those new advances, other states start to open up as further possibilities: Alaska, with a 3% lead, South Carolina with a 4% lead.
Those large leads may come in as the impact of the tapes fades — indeed, maybe they’re all wrong, as per the UK 2015 election and Brexit, and the only accurate poll is The LA Times, which has been a consistent outlier and shows the race as tied*. But they may be correct, and they may get worse. There are clearly hundreds of hours of tape of Trump out there, from TV, radio shows, godknowswhat. How much damage more menacing sexual trash talk would do is an open question — indeed, if it’s any dirtier, it will be impossible for cable TV news to play it — but what if it was racial and used the N-word? What if it was racial and sexual? Trump is the right-wing white American id — that’s what his base likes about him. Everything will be in there somewhere.
The supercache would be the tapes from The Apprentice, on which Trump appeared for a dozen years, and which, according to past crew on the show, show Trump to be rude, arrogant and, once again, predatory. However, producer Mark Burnett has claimed that he does not have the legal right to produce such tapes, and pirate copies have not yet surfaced. If the Democrats or Democrat-friendly media do have them, they’ll be waiting until the eve of the third debate, on October 19, to release them.
[Razer: Trump, Clinton go to war exploiting abused women]
Besides, the roll-out from the weekend just keeps going. Soon after the Access Hollywood tapes came out, tapes from the ’90s Howard Stern radio show emerged, in which Trump bragged about “walking around backstage” at the Miss Universe competition, where some of the women were naked. Today that has been followed by statements from contestants that Trump used to do this at “Miss Teen USA”, a pageant he also owned. That one’s just kicking off now, and it might be a little harder for Trump to dodge. The New York Times story, released early, in which two women speak of Trump groping them, one in the ’80s, one in 2005, has one woman — sitting next to him on a flight — saying “it was when he put his hands up my skirt that I moved to coach; he was like an octopus, with six arms”. Wounded octopus then. Nevertheless, there are testimony witnesses — people to whom the women recounted the story to at the time — and more will come. If there’s anyone with a story of an incident less than seven years old — the statute of limitations in most states — then Trump might have criminal charges to face.
Those Republicans who disassociated themselves from Trump on the weekend are breathing a sigh of relief — and those who haven’t are, as one insider told MSNBC, “waking up each morning and wondering if today is the day, or if they’re too late” — but they have earned a new enemy: Donald Trump, who in the past few days has turned much of his fire away from Clinton to sections of the Republican Party, especially Paul Ryan and the Congressional Republicans. Ryan has said that he won’t campaign for or appear with Trump again, but that he won’t disendorse him. Trump took that well.
In rallies over the last couple of days, he’s spent long stretches attacking the Republican Party — and riling his supporters up to calls of “revolution”, and to a president-only vote, ignoring Senate and House. For the first time, the Democrats are beginning to consider the possibility that they might be able to flip the House. No easy task — they would have to take 30 seats in a ridiculously gerrymandered chamber.
The current lists of districts in play only list about 40 or so, and 10 of them are Democratic seats, once at risk of going the other way. But now, they are at looking at seats with a 10%, 12% margin. Were they to take it, or come close, and take the Senate as well, then Hillary Clinton could get a budget passed, run a well-funded foreign policy and create a progressive majority on the Supreme Court. That would be a chance to cement a certain type of progressivism in place, which is why so many on the right are beginning to talk in apocalyptic language — such as Alex Jones, the “Infowars” radio host, who asserts that both Obama and Clinton are demons who “stink of sulfur”.
[Rundle: Trump boasts of ‘grabbing pussy’, GOP ducks for cover]
Currently, the Republican leadership is split, with Reince Priebus of the RNC continuing to support and fund the presidential campaign, while the Congressional wing is steering funds and support away from him. Fifty years after the Chinese cultural revolution, in which that country’s leadership was divided into warring factions, the Republican Party is staging a do-over. Most reasonable Republicans have given up on the White House this time round — indeed their strategy now is that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats will have such power that the idea of a restraining counter-president could become viable in 2020.
With all this going on — the NYT story broke as I was writing, and the one about Trump’s porn star kidnap and killing that one guy broke afterward — the Republicans have made it difficult to use the rolling WikiLeaks releases of the Podesta emails, which reveal the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches. Hamstrung also by the fact that there is no smoking gun in the emails, so far as one can tell — 7000 of a claimed 50,000 on file have been released.
Most recently, there was the suggestion of leaks of upcoming questions from Democratic-aligned CNN TV talking heads to team Hillary — a bit spicy, until CNN denied giving any access to such questions to partisan talking heads. Stuff about having a public and private position, about having open borders and being pro-socialised medicine don’t reveal anything new, and they cancel each other out. Hillary’s left! No, she’s neoliberal! Maybe there’s something in there, but, if so, no one’s found it yet — and if it’s that buried, its complexities will be well beyond the “undecided” voters the campaigns are now competing for.
What Clinton’s opponents may have hoped for — direct communication about bombing country X so that Bechtel can then rebuild it, and use the profits to shoot them a donation — ain’t there. To be honest, with Trump’s erraticism, it’s hard to know what could be revealed that would steer the uncommitted away from her. WikiLeaks, having hitherto used the single big file dump at times, is not helping itself against perceptions that it is acting strategically with the daily feed of new documents. Indeed, the process may be proving counterproductive, allowing the Clinton camp to claim that Putin’s agents are feeding and doctoring the material.
Trump’s rallies meanwhile are spinning out of control, amusingly and not so much. The abuse towards the media — with the entire audience turning to the central media enclosure, on Trump’s direction, and yelling “traitors, traitors” — is going to end in violence before polling day dawns. Trump has said he would jail not only Hillary, but her lawyers too, that the only way he can lose this election is if it’s stolen, that he’s “very good at working things out”, that if president, he wants “a veto power over the media, like Hillary has”, and that “I basically consider myself a blue-collar man”. Sadly, so do many of his fervent supporters. If only one had the business amoralism that has taken Trump to the debt-ridden “top”, one could stand outside their rallies and sell timeshare resorts, weight-loss tea, a sound engineering course, the whole schmear.
*The LA Times poll, as per an NYT story, uses very specific banding and then weighting to try and model national mood; consequently, the fact that one young pro-Trump black man in Chicago has stopped filling out the tracking survey has caused Trump’s rating in the poll to dive by several points.
The word “careen”, meaning “clean the hull of a boat” has mysteriously replaced the word “career’, meaning”travel at high speed out of control”. Congradulations.
Dude, you need a more comprehensive dictionary. There are any number available for free online.
“Dude”. Oh dear. The use of “careen” to mean “career” started in the 20th century and resulted from a mistake. In Australia the word “career”, used correctly, is still far more prevalent than “careen” but like “gotten”, “elevator”, “congradulations” and “garlic aïoli” is rapidly colonising the language.
so what yr saying, R, is that ‘careen’ is actually used correctly in the headline?
Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
– Geoffrey Chaucer.
ca•reen (kə-rēnˈ)►
To lurch or swerve while in motion.
To rush headlong or carelessly; career: “He careened through foreign territories on a desperate kind of blitz” ( Anne Tyler)
Nautical To lean to one side, as a ship sailing in the wind.
….I think the title use is ok.
Is that the choice: a warmonger or an iconoclast?
The warmongers have had a pretty good go. Time for a change before Russia and China engage too closely in their chosen spheres of influence.
Thanks Edna, but this is an argument i really don’t understand.
Clinton has fought for women’s rights, universal health care, marriage equality. Her voting position was the same as Bernie Sanders 93% of the time. 538 classified her as a hard-core left-wing liberal in May 2015. OnTheIssues saw her as “barely more moderate” than Sanders.
If you’re working for the US government, of course you can be characterised as a warmonger. The whole of the US was taken with the delusion of 2003, as was the whole of the AngloSphere. Personally i think people in the US are realising how awful their imperialist, colonialist government has been over the last 150 years, and Hillary is getting all the blame.
And yes, it’s about gender, a woman has to be 100 times better than a man to get the same appreciation in a job application. Which she is.
Seriously? A Trumpa-lumpa is the “change” you want to see? THIS Trumpa-lumpa?
Saw some footage of Trump at a rally post-debate#2 in which he’s goading the ‘basket of deplorables’ to turn around and face the media stage and let them know what they think. Besides the fact that the camera was actually panning the hall, as Trump insisted that they never do, it looked pretty intimidating.
As Trump raises the temperature at these rallies, you’d have to wonder if someone is going to get carried away and ‘shoot back’ in the non-film sense.
I suspect that the spiral downward will now be independent of any more damaging leaks from Trump’s sleazy past. He’s driving the bus and is no longer applying any brakes.
Trump is acting suicidal and his supporters are ready to self implode. Pretty much sounds like a Sleeper Cell operation.
I can see rainbows in the sky, birds chirping with glee and dolphins jumping out of the water clapping their flippers on Nov 8
Well, there will certainly be a uuuuuuugggggge sigh of relief around the world if the sane citizens of USA dodge having that disgrace as their President.
The eye-popping Trump bloodlust now being released is taking on the characteristics of a public flaying of a sacrificial totem. On top of his own admittedly gimcrack boorishness it feels like he’s become symbolic of all that simmers repulsively just below the civilised surface of ‘Judeo-Christian civilation’: the grotesque reality of free market extremism, celebrity-fascism, rampant sexual exploitation and opportunism (by both…soz, all genders) , bowel-loosening emotional and aesthetic garishness in every dimension.
Trump rips off the cover of the functioning underbelly of modern America and embraces it as virtue and aspiration. What on earth does anyone reckon a beauty pageant is, if not an exercise in women voluntarily parading their tits and asses in public in the hope of securing some kind of power, while men slobber over the prospect of sex with them? Trump barging in on ‘his merchandise’ standing naked and powerless to do anything about it is close to a withering performance art critique. What do we all think the heartbeat of ‘The American Dream’ is, if not clawing your way into a position from which the plebs will ‘let you do whatever they want?’ What has the last half century proved again and again IS the essence of American power, if not throwing your enemies in jail (or worse) just because you won, and you can? What has US politics been if not clannish insiderism, utterly disconnected from democratic reality?
Trump is just American Power Society – Clan Bush, Clan Clinton, Clan Money & Celebrity – without the showbiz polish. So of course he must be shown to be hideously beyond all recognition, beyond the pale, from outer space. And cathartically despatched.
Oooh, but let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out, I say. I love it. I’m loving this delicious self-exposure of a rotten, decadent system. Trump will, quite rightly, be butchered in the public square….but what then, America?
What then?
Interesting that grundle has abandoned his trade mark verbal pyrotechnics recently as otiose, superfluous, redundant and irrelevant to the task of describing the Drumpf.
When the reality is so beyond credence, satire can take a rest – it is impossible to ridicule the ridiculous.