As it now becomes clear that the political components that held Republican Party together are unraveling — how profound and long-lasting is yet to be determined — you have to wonder: is the GOP’s all-but-certain 2016 Presidential nominee working to lose the women’s vote? It would appear that way.
Trump — who has sent American politics into the toilet and clogged it with so much smelly rhetorical excreted waste that the nation needs to call Rotorooter — has done what many predicted he would do: he decided to start going after likely Democratic Presidential candidate former Secretary of State Clinton for her husband’s sexual behavior as President, and paint her as an enabler. As usual, Trump does not have any proven, factual, without-a-doubt documentation to back up his claims, unless you count those books whose authors are popular with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity audiences.
And what’s as evident as Trump’s lack of qualification (and old fashioned class) to occupy the Oval Office is this: there are TONS of issues on which Donald Trump can engage Hillary Clinton, blast her policies and offer alternatate ones. But Trump isn’t about policy. He’s about personality and name-calling.
Now Trump has decided to make it a double header: since Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has gone after him in no uncertain terms he lashed out a her, too.
He has now has called Clinton “an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler” of her husband and without any solid proof accuses her of destroying the lives of his accusers. “She’s been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives,” CNN reports Trump as saying “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.” CNN adds: “Trump did not expand upon what he believes Clinton did to “destroy” the lives of those women.”
Of course not.
Before the campaign is over we’ll hear about Whitewater (a bust for Republicans who went after Clinton) and the name “Vince Foster” (who those suffering from Clinton derangement syndrome suggested was killed by the Clintons).
Meanwhile, Trump had some name-calling for Warren as well:
Donald Trump set his sophomoric sights on a new target Friday night during an all-out Twitter temper tantrum.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee labeled liberal darling Elizabeth Warren “goofy,” “a fraud,” and “weak and ineffective” during his social media meltdown.
“I hope corrupt Hillary Clinton chooses goofy Elizabeth Warren as her running mate. I will defeat them both,” Trump wrote in the first of a series of attacks on Warren.
“Goofy Elizabeth Warren is weak and ineffective. Does nothing. All talk, no action — maybe her Native American name?” he later wrote.
Warren, who has been one of the bluntest Democrats willing to take Trump on, did not mince words in her own response, as Time notes:
In a series of Tweets on Friday, Warren called Trump a “bully who has a single play in his playbook—offensive lies thrown at anyone who calls him out” after he described her claims to Native American heritage as “phony.” Warren’s heritage became an issue during her 2012 Senate campaign against Republican incumbent Scott Brown, and Trump has criticized her for it before.
Friday’s back-and-forth is the latest in an ongoing feud between the two. Earlier this week, Warren accused Trump of building a “campaign on racism, sexism, and xenophobia.” Trump responded on Friday during his speech at a rally in Oregon, calling her a “goofus” and a “basketcase.”
The progressive senator, who many Democrats had hoped would run for president this year, has been a vocal critic of Trump throughout his campaign and is speculated to be a vice presidential contender.
“I hope corrupt Hillary Clinton chooses goofy Elizabeth Warren as her running mate,” Trump posted to Twitter on Friday. “I will defeat them both.”
Warren quickly hit back, calling his attacks “lame” and slamming the presumptive GOP nominee for “racism, sexism & xenophobia.”
Writes Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum: “Trump claims that Chelsea Clinton knew all about Benghazi. Huma Abedin is disgusting for sticking with her husband. Beyoncé wouldn’t have any fans if she were a man. Shonda Rimes is an affirmative-action hire who has ruined ABC’s Thursday-night TV lineup. Malia Obama is going to Harvard on the taxpayer’s dime. Kim Kardashian is a total slut. Laura Bush is a loser. Amal Clooney defends terrorists. Gloria Steinem sure hasn’t aged well. Natalie Portman was terrible in Star Wars. Keep it up, Donald. You’re doing great so far.”
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Trump is going to pick up one single non-Trumpista vote from women and change the minds of many women who consider his past comments and marriages of evidence that he is indeed a pig. His past comments support that theory. Trump’s problem — and the problem now for the GOP and those within the GOP that are now endorsing or enabling him — is that he’s not expanding the GOP tent. He’s building a wall around it to keep those who don’t hail him out.
Not that people who are members of his existing political tribe are scrambling to get into the new Trumpublican Party.
Undoubtedly, this will play well with the committed Trump supporters and the #NeverHillary contingent, who are itching for a no-holds-barred fight with the Clintons. It may play well with other Republicans who believe that Mitt Romney and John McCain failed to take the gloves off in their failed presidential bids. That could help turn out voters — in deep-red areas. But will other voters, especially those in swing states that will decide the election, care about affairs and scandals from the 1990s? Most voters in these areas don’t want a return to the 1990s or personal-attack politics. And in talking with some voters in these areas, I found at least anecdotal evidence that the emphasis on negative attacks against Obama turned off some persuadable voters in battleground states and counties who never heard a positive and specific agenda from Romney and the GOP in 2012.
Still, it’s early, and Trump could be doing this to ensure that the base remains happy and the nomination remains secure. In that context, this attack strategy makes plenty of sense, but it remains to be seen whether Trump will revive it after the convention — or will pivot to a different campaign strategy aimed at the persuadables.
But I doubt Trump will persuade many people who have either soured on him or who look at him and hear him and almost want to puke at his substance-free style of “politics” that appeals to anger, rage and operates on junior high school style insults. You can’t erase videos of comments about Mexicans being rapists, Barack Obama maybe not being born here, detectives being sent to uncover the evidence that Obama wasn’t born here (with the media being negligent in not asking him precisely what these costly detectives found), banning Muslims from the United States, etc. A craven politician like Sen. John McCain 4.0 (he has had many versions since he shed the principled “maverick” of 2000 and since he showed zero judgment in selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate) may endorse Trump, even though he was insulted by him. Former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole has now endorsed him as well. This is still unlikely to enlarge the Trumplican Party’s tent by much.
Talking Point’s Josh Marshall points out that in many ways the polls have been predictable and are likely to remain so:
We should expect – and we are already seeing – both Clinton’s and Trump’s net favorability ratings go up over the coming weeks, as party members coalesce around their standard-bearers as drive up approval rates within their won parties. But as it will happen for both there’s little reason to believe it will affect their relative standing. Let me reemphasize the point. Polls aren’t always right. And you need to know how to interpret them. Ted Cruz was polling fairly well against Hillary Clinton until he started to get a lot of press attention, at which point he started to collapse because everyone hates Ted Cruz once they get to know him.
With Trump and Clinton we’re dealing with two candidates who have been the focus of intense media attention for a year. In different ways, they’ve been in the media spotlight for decades. The polls are telling us a pretty clear story. Trump is very popular with base Republican voters, particularly older and whiter and male ones. Everything he’s done to gain that popularity has made him extremely unpopular with almost everyone else. Changing that will be very hard. Polls, if you actually pay attention to them, have predicted this cycle quite successfully. No reason to believe that will change in the general.
But it’s hard to win over many voters who you insulted, or frightened.
The pity is that there are many thoughtful, serious and honorable Republicans, conservative and not so conservative.
And Donald Trump, most assuredly, is not one of them.
Cartoon by DonkeyHotey via Flickr
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.