GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Plunging deeper into campaign controversy, Donald Trump publicly shamed a former beauty queen on Friday for her “disgusting” sexual past and then — in one of presidential history’s more bizarre moments — encouraged Americans to watch a “sex tape” he said would support his case.
Even many of Trump’s supporters shook their heads at his latest outburst, which could further hurt him among the nation’s women, many of them already skeptical, whose votes he’ll badly need to win election.
“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?” read a missive from Trump posted on Twitter at 5:30 a.m. That referred to 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a Venezuela-born woman whose weight gain he has said created terrible problems for the pageant he formerly owned.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s pre-dawn tweet-storm ricocheted across the campaign trail.
Trump’s campaign accused the media and Hillary Clinton of colluding to set him up for fresh condemnation, to which Clinton retorted, “His latest twitter meltdown is unhinged, even for him.”
Machado took to Facebook to say his tweets were part of a pattern of “demoralizing women,” calling them “cheap lies with bad intentions.” Planned Parenthood said it showed that Trump’s “misogyny knows no bounds.” And Clinton said they showed anew why someone with Trump’s temperament “should not be anywhere near the nuclear codes.”
With less than 40 days left in the election, Trump’s broadside threw his campaign into a fresh round of second-guessing the candidate’s instincts and confusion about what to do next. To believers in traditional political norms, the tirade seemed like the opposite of what was needed to win over females, Hispanics and young Americans whose support could well determine the election.
Shaming Machado over intimate details from her past could be particularly risky as Trump tries to win over more female voters, many of whom are turned away by such personal attacks. It also risks calling further attention to the thrice-married Trump’s own history with women.
Charges of lying flew back and forth.
What kind of a man, Clinton asked, “stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?”
Trump implored voters not to believe news stories about his campaign citing anonymous sources. “There are no sources, they are just made up lies!” he tweeted.
Yet even Trump’s most vocal allies seemed at a loss for words.
“He’s being Trump. I don’t have any comment beyond that,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a top supporter.
For Republicans, the outburst seemed to foreclose any possibility that Trump, in the campaign’s final weeks, might reinvent himself as someone with the discipline and restraint that many voters want in their commander in chief.