Unmindful of the consequences of electoral disarray, an “unshackled” Donald Trump has virtually declared war on the Republican establishment, escalating his attacks on House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain and telling them he doesn’t care for their support.
Simultaneously, the Republican nominee seized on a newly-unloaded dump of hacked emails from Wikileaks to hammer Hillary Clinton on several fronts, including “collusion” with Department of Justice for a possible heads-up on a judge’s thinking over her own email saga.
“The Hillary Clinton documents released today by Wikileaks make more clear than ever just how much is at stake in this election. So much corruption,” Trump said at a Florida rally. Claiming to possess some 50,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s account, Wikileaks has so far released around 6,000 of them. In the midst of the rising crescendo of charges and counter-charges, President Barack Obama hit the campaign trail for Clinton in North Carolina, attacking Trump’s lewd remarks about women in a 2005 video. No decent human being can approve of it, he said, adding Trump does not have the temperament, judgement or “basic honesty” to occupy the White House.
After his Twitter outbursts against Speaker Ryan and Senator McCain on Tuesday morning, Trump kept up the offensive in an interview to Fox News, asserting: “I don’t want his (Ryan’s) support, I don’t care about his support.” Calling McCain “foul-mouthed”, Trump branded both of them as “disloyal” in not backing the party’s official nominee.
Trump’s attack came in response to Ryan’s decision not to defend or campaign with him against the backdrop of the lewd video scandal that prompted about 40 Republican lawmakers, including Senator McCain, to distance themselves from him. Several of them demanded that he step down, while others withdrew their endorsements of him.
Quizzed on the fallout from the lewd video in respect of women votes for him, Trump claimed: “I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and say, ‘Boy, I’ve heard that and I’ve heard a lot worse than that over my life. If that’s what it is going to take to lose an election, that will be pretty sad.” Trump has apologised for the lewd comments, but has continued to maintain that it was just “locker room talk”.
At his campaign rally in Florida, Trump, putting aside the party rift, focused almost exclusively on Clinton, asserted that if she was voted to power, the US will no longer remain a free country, but will become “a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments”.
Bringing up the Wikileaks’ dump, he said how President Obama’s Department of Justice “fed information to the Clinton campaign about the email investigation, so that the campaign could be prepared to cover up her crimes”.
“This is collusion and corruption of the highest order, and is one more reason why I will ask my Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor. We have to investigate the investigation,” he said, adding: “These Wikileaks emails confirm what those of us here today have known all along: Hillary Clinton is the vessel for a corrupt global establishment that is raiding our country and surrendering our sovereignty.”
“New emails revealed today show that during the deadly earthquake in Haiti, which killed over 150,000 people, the Clintons couldn’t stop cashing in,” he charged, adding: “As people were dying in Haiti, Clinton insiders were separating out requests from ‘Friends of Bill’ or ‘William Jefferson Clinton VIPs’ so that their business interests or contracts would receive special treatment. People who were labelled ‘Not Friends of Bill’ were placed on the sidelines.” Slamming the American mainstream media that is mostly backing Hillary Clinton as part and parcel of the “rigged” system, Trump labelled a host of media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, as “simply an extension of the Clinton Campaign”.