Trump wades deeper into Miss Universe flap
Republican attacks Machado again in series of early morning tweets
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 women voters, 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?” 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 predawn series of tweets 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 social media 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.
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.
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. Generally chatty and occasionally critical of Trump, Gingrich said tersely that Trump sometimes does “strange things,” but that Clinton lies. “I’ll let you decide which is worse for America.”
But Trump’s inner circle followed his lead by refusing to concede any missteps. Trump returned with a new tweet invoking Clinton’s famous ad from her 2008 campaign portraying her as the best candidate to pick up an urgent call at the White House at 3 a.m.
“For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o’clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!” Trump wrote.
Machado has been thrust to center stage in the campaign since Clinton noted Monday in the first debate that Trump had mocked her publicly for gaining weight after she won Miss Universe. If that was a trap laid by Clinton, the irrepressible Trump dug himself deeper the next day by saying Machado’s “massive” weight gain had been “a real problem.”
That gave Clinton’s campaign the opening it wanted. Her team circulated videos featuring Machado accusing Trump of destroying her selfconfidence and arranged for reporters to interview her, just as many voters were starting to cast early ballots. Clinton’s spokesman said she called Machado Friday to thank her for her courage. Spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said Clinton did not help Machado become a citizen.
Trump’s Twitter taunts appeared to refer to footage from a Spanish reality show in 2005 in which Machado was a contestant and appeared on camera in bed with a male contestant. The images are grainy and do not include nudity, though Machado later acknowledged in the Hispanic media that she was having sex in the video.