Trump’s bizarre descent into vitriol

Trump responded with derision, mimicking Leeds and dismissing her story. “I was with Trump in 1980. I was sitting with him on an airplane and he went after me on the plane,” the Republican presidential nominee said, using the voice he often deploys to mock people.

.. In responding to his accusers with such malice and nothing tangible to discredit their allegations, Trump is further ceding the moral high ground to his opponent and recklessly imperiling Republican candidates down the ballot.

.. These are lies being pushed by the media and the Clinton campaign to try and keep their grip on our country,” Trump argued. “They are all false. They’re totally invented fiction. All 100 percent totally and completely fabricated. Never met this person, these people. I don’t know who they are.”

.. “When you looked at that horrible woman last night, you said ‘I don’t think so,’” Trump told his supporters. “I don’t think so. Whoever she is, wherever she comes from, the stories are total fiction. They are 100 percent made up. They never happened. They never would happen. I don’t think it happened with very many people, but they certainly aren’t gonna happen with me.”

.. Incredulous over his current plight, Trump posed a rhetorical question to his supporters—or, perhaps, it was a suggestion to the media he claims is so biased against him—about President Obama, who lashed the GOP nominee in another speech Friday morning and, in Trump’s view, has not been subjected to the same level of media scrutiny as himself.

“Why doesn’t some woman say what they say about me about him?” Trump said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donald-trump-vitriol-229819#ixzz4NAjYo4HE
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Trump suggests his accusers are too unattractive to assault

Trump also disputed the account of Kristin Anderson, who told The Washington Post on Friday that Trump slid his fingers inside her miniskirt to touch her vagina through her underwear while she was engaged in a conversation inside a Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.

Trump argued it was untrue because she claimed he was sitting alone in a club, saying that “I really don’t sit alone that much.”

.. He outright rejected any allegation against him, claiming to his supporters that they’re all a result of a conspiracy created by collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign designed to keep him out of the White House.

.. five Miss Teen USA pageant contestants told BuzzFeed that Trump would enter the contestants’ dressing rooms while the girls were changing. And in 1992 “Entertainment Tonight” footage released by CBS this week, Trump talks to a young girl and tells the camera he’s going to be dating her in 10 years.

Even Republicans know the Bill Clinton attacks don’t work

Matthews said, female voters viewed attacks on Hillary Clinton’s spouse as “inherently unfair. Ultimately, it came back down to this: Bill Clinton’s not the one who’s running.”

When it came to criticizing Hillary Clinton as an enabler, Matthews said, the reaction was, “yeah, you’re angry. It’s a normal reaction. Any line of messaging on this generates sympathy for her, or voters said it was completely irrelevant.”

The women in the America Rising focus group also identified areas they would consider off-limits in terms of Clinton attacks: “It was her age, her stamina, her health and her looks,” Matthews recalled.

.. With 26 days to go in the race, Donald Trump has said he plans to launch a full-scale attack on the former president. “We’re going to turn Bill [Clinton] into Bill Cosby,” his campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News earlier this week.

.. On Thursday night, Sean Hannity plans to feature three of Bill Clinton’s accusers: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. And Trump’s campaign has promised new revelations from previously unknown women.

.. But Democratic allies are thrilled with the politically nonsensical narrative.

.. Brock called it “a giant exercise in projection. If there’s a Bill Cosby here, it will turn out to be Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.”

.. in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, her operatives found that suburban women in New York disliked Clinton because of her decision to stay with her husband.

.. the campaign chose not to address the issue head-on, focusing instead on working-class women upstate, who viewed Hillary Clinton as a champion.

.. Democrats close to Clinton speculated that the individuals guiding Trump’s strategy, like Bannon, are most likely focused on what will happen after Nov. 8 — and empowering the Trump base to become a movement of anti-Clinton opposition, whether it’s through a media operation or a grass-roots movement.

.. the biggest problem with the attacks, some Clinton allies said, was the source:

The Tweetstorm Heard ‘Round the Republican Party

Women nationwide are denouncing Donald Trump. Conservative Marybeth Glenn is furious that men aren’t following suit—and she has a message for them.

you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.

Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation. Jeff Sessions says that he wouldn’t “characterize” Trump’s unauthorized groping of women as “assault.”

Are you kidding me?!

Others try to rebuke his comments, yet STILL choose to vote for a sexual predator – because let’s be honest, that’s what he is. “What he said is wrong, and the way he treats women is wrong, but it’s not wrong enough for me to not vote for him.”

Thanks, cowards.

Various men in the movement are writing it off as normal, confirming every stereotype the left has thrown at them. So I’m done. I’m sooo done.

If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you. I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.

.. These sentiments felt so familiar to me. Then I realized why. It’s how I heard Catholic women of my mom’s generation talk after the church’s child molestation scandal broke. Learning about the predatory behavior was awful in its own right. But what really caused them to lose faith, what caused many of them to never return to the Catholic Church, were the religious leaders who failed to denounce the molestation; who dishonestly minimized it in hopes of saving the institution in the short term.

A bad actor can cause a scandal in any institution. The true test of core soundness or rot is how everyone else reacts to the depravity.

.. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.

.. rare election where the larger the margin of the GOP loss, the better the chance it will have to be reborn into something viable and constructive.