Unfazed by the lewd video backlash, a feisty Donald Trump threatened Hillary Clinton with the prospect of a jail term over her email controversy and raked up Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct saga from the 1990s in a bitter face-off at the second presidential debate in St louis on Sunday night.
Faced with a campaign meltdown with Republican lawmakers deserting him in droves after Friday’s release of the video on his vulgar comments about women, Trump went on the attack mode against his Democratic rival right from the word go in an all-out bid to retrieve lost ground.
In a clear attempt to deflect attention from his scandalous comments in the 2005 video, Trump sought to embarrass the Clintons by bringing to the debate hall four women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual advances and even rape. While a case of alleged rape was dismissed, he had settled a sexual harassment lawsuit with one of the women, Paula Jones.
Trump went on to target Hillary Clinton, saying she “attacked those same women and attacked them viciously”. Contrasting his “words” with Clinton’s “actions” as he put it, Trump said: “I apologise for those words….But what President Clinton did, he was impeached, he lost his licence to practice law. He had to pay an $8,50,000 fine to one of the women.”
Even as Trump said he was “very embarrassed” by his comments in the video but sought to explain them away as “locker room talk” and insisted that they did not represent who he actually was, Hillary Clinton challenged the contention, saying: “I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is.”
“No, I have not,” Trump asserted, when debate moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN asked pointedly about his video comments about “kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals”. He went on to claim: “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”
Both Clinton and Trump bitterly sparred over a host of issues during the 90-minute encounter, notably on their fitness to serve as president. Clinton brought up the issue first, saying the billionaire businessman was different from previous Republican nominees in that he was “not fit to be President and commander-in-chief”.
“It’s not only women, and it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be our President, because he has also targeted immigrants, African-Americans, latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims, and so many others. So this is who Donald Trump is,” she said, obliquely deriding Trump’s “Make America
Great Again” campaign theme by asserting America was already great.
Trump for his part projected her as someone who is “all talk, no action”, not having delivered on any front despite having been in public life for more than 30 years. Attacking her repeatedly over her policies and judgement, he said Clinton, given her record, should never become the president of the United States.
Clinton attacked Trump for his insults directed at immigrants, Muslims and other segments, saying he has never apologised for all his slurs. “And he never apologised for the racist lie that President Obama was not born in the United States of America. He owes the president an apology, he owes our country an apology, and he needs to take responsibility for his actions and his words,” she said.
Trump, seizing on the string of apologies that Clinton wanted from him, told her that it is she who should really be apologising “for the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted” and “for the two boxes of e-mails and other things last week that were taken from an office and are now missing”.
While Clinton dismissed his assertions as “absolutely false”, Trump went on to say that, if elected President, he will appoint a special prosecutor to look into the email scandal.
And when Clinton remarked it was “just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country”, he retorted to cheers from his supporters in the hall, “Because you’d be in jail.”
Clinton also attacked Trump over his “shortsighted” and “dangerous” pronouncements such as his plan to ban Muslims from entering the US, Trump, who has since modified it somewhat, said his plans is for “extreme vetting from certain areas of the world”.
The debate that got off to a chilly start without even the customary handshake turned nasty in no time and remained so till the very end, when a questioner lightened the mood by asking if the two of them, regardless of the current rhetoric, could name one positive thing that they respect in one another. That prompted Clinton to praise Trump’s children, saying they were “incredibly able and devoted”. Trump, in turn, said the one good trait he saw in Clinton was that she’s not a quitter. “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up. I respect that.”
2nd presidential debate most tweeted ever
St louis: The second presidential debate between Democrat Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump has become the most tweeted debate of all time, with over 17 million messages tweeted over the showdown. “This is now the most Tweeted debate ever,” Nick Pacilio, spokesman of Twitter said. Donald Trump accounted for 64 per cent of the conversation on this social media website, while Clinton accounted for 36 per cent, according to the Silicon Valley-based social media company. At the end of the 90 minute debate, Clinton earned 25,000 new followers, while Trump got 16,000 new followers.
Obama blasts Trump’s ‘demeaning, degrading’ comments on women
Washington: President Barack Obama condemned the Republican vying to replace him in the White House, Donald Trump, for his “demeaning” lewd boasts about groping women that have thrown his campaign into crisis. “Are we really going to risk giving Donald Trump the power to roll back all the progress we’ve madeIJ” Obama asked during a campaign event for Democrats.