Who Is to Blame for Trump’s Polling?
If you ask the candidate, anyone or anything other than himself is to blame for his standing in the polls. The New York Times gives Hillary Clinton an 89 percent chance of winning the election.
By TURNER COWLES on
Donald J. Trump wielded his presidential candidacy on Friday as a weapon for savaging detractors and venting personal grievances, attacking the women who have accused him of sexual assault and unwelcome advances and railing against what he described as a vast conspiracy against him by the news media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
With a campaign speech in North Carolina that whirled from one target to the next, Mr. Trump accelerated his shift away from courting swing voters or delivering a message aimed at the political mainstream.
Instead, after weeks on the defensive, battered by disclosures about his treatment of women and about his business dealings, Mr. Trump appeared increasingly consumed with the idea that he has been wronged and bent on convincing his fans that sinister forces are to blame for his political decline.
Mr. Trump told the restive crowd that his advisers wanted him to focus on his core economic message, but that he had no intention of allowing his critics to go unanswered
“My people always say: ‘Oh, don’t talk about it. Talk about jobs. Talk about the economy,’” Mr. Trump said.
“But I feel I have to talk about them, because you have to dispute when somebody says something,” he added of the allegations against him. “Fortunately, we have the microphone. We’re able to dispute; some people can’t.”
Even as two more women came forward on Friday to say he had groped them, Mr. Trump dismissed the mounting accusations as “total fiction” and “lies, lies, lies.” He assailed the motives of the women speaking out against him, and seemed to mock two of them as not attractive enough to draw his interest.
“Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” Mr. Trump said of Jessica Leeds, who said Mr. Trump groped her on an airplane in the 1980s. He referred to Ms. Leeds, now 74, as “that horrible woman.”
On the Trail: Week of Oct. 9
Doug Mills/The New York Times
He was similarly dismissive of Natasha Stoynoff, a former writer for People magazine, who accused Mr. Trump of physically accosting her during an interview. “Check out her Facebook page, you’ll understand,” he said.
Mr. Trump also ridiculed his opponent in the presidential race, Mrs. Clinton, for saying that he had crowded her physically during their last debate, and he seemed to offer an insult about her physique. When Mrs. Clinton walked in front of him, he told a crowd in Greensboro, N.C., “Believe me, I wasn’t impressed.”
And as he blasted the women who have made allegations against him as fabricators, Mr. Trump suggested that perhaps someone should make similar claims against President Obama next.
“Why doesn’t some woman, maybe, come up and say what they say falsely about me — they could say it about him,” Mr. Trump said.
Though Mr. Trump has said he will provide information to refute his accusers’ stories wholesale, he offered no such evidence in North Carolina. He has also loudly threatened to sue multiple publications for printing the stories of his accusers, but as of Friday evening no such suit had been filed.
Mr. Trump made only passing reference to the newest accusations against him. In an interview with The Washington Post, a woman named Kristin Anderson said Mr. Trump had slipped his hand beneath her skirt and grabbed her genitals at a Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.
Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman denied the account, and Mr. Trump said in his speech that certain details were implausible because he rarely sits alone at nightclubs. But The Post did not say Ms. Anderson had described Mr. Trump as being alone.
A second woman, Summer Zervos, a Republican and a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” said at a news conference in Los Angeles that Mr. Trump had tried to seduce her over dinner at a hotel in 2007, grabbing her breasts and thrusting his pelvis into her body. Ms. Zervos, 41, appeared alongside Gloria Allred, the celebrity litigator and a Democrat who was a delegate for Mrs. Clinton.
Trump’s Comments and Your Relationship
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Mr. Trump denied in a statement several hours later that he ever had a meeting with Ms. Zervos at a hotel or “greeted her inappropriately.” He again attacked the media and said he would “take my message directly to the American people.”
The claims against Mr. Trump have gained a momentum of their own since the revelation on Oct. 7 of a recording in which he boasted to a television host about sexually assaulting women. That tape led to the direct questioning of Mr. Trump, at Sunday’s debate, about whether he had ever actually done the things he described. Mr. Trump’s denial prompted Ms. Leeds to come forward in an interview with The New York Times; Ms. Anderson said Ms. Leeds had inspired her to tell her story.
After learning of Ms. Leeds’s story, Ms. Anderson told The Post, she decided: “Let me just back these girls up.”
By lashing out in multiple directions and presenting himself as the target of a corrupt plot, Mr. Trump may deepen his emotional bond with voters who have turned to him as a kind of political wrecking ball aimed at Washington. But it is an unlikely strategy for improving his standing with the majority of voters who say in polls that he is ill-suited to the presidency and biased against women and minorities.
Democrats have called the charges women have made against Mr. Trump disqualifying. On Thursday in New Hampshire, Michelle Obama said she had been shaken by Mr. Trump’s cavalier bragging about assault.
Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood and a prominent Clinton supporter, predicted women would revolt against Mr. Trump’s remarks in North Carolina.
“If they weren’t already convinced, today proved to Americans that Donald Trump is an abusive and vindictive monster,” Ms. Richards said. “With every ugly and violent insult that comes out of his mouth, Trump loses a vote, and our country gains a feminist.”
Leading Republicans have already pulled back from his campaign, and new signs of distance emerged on Friday between Mr. Trump and the party he nominally leads.
Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, who announced this week that he would no longer defend Mr. Trump, ignored him entirely in a speech to college Republicans in Wisconsin. Mr. Ryan criticized Mrs. Clinton and Democratic policies, but made no case for his own party’s nominee.Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is seeking re-election, released a television commercial saying he has “a lot of disagreements” with Mr. Trump. And in a closely fought congressional race in central New York, the National Republican Congressional Committee has an ad vowing that its candidate, Claudia Tenney, will “stand up to Hillary Clinton” — implying that Mrs. Clinton will be the next president.
Mr. Trump, who has savaged Mr. Ryan repeatedly this week, declined to revisit their conflict on Friday afternoon.
But Mr. Trump escalated his war on the news media, and unveiled a theory that The New York Times was attacking him at the behest of a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, who is the largest individual holder of New York Times Company common shares.
Reporters for the newspaper, Mr. Trump said, should be seen as “corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and Hillary Clinton.”
“No media is more corrupt than the failing New York Times,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s bitter attacks on the news media, and Mr. Slim in particular, seem to echo the precise language used by two of his advisers, Stephen K. Bannon and Roger Stone, who have long cast Mr. Slim as an ominous presence in the American news media.
In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said Mr. Slim had no involvement in the paper’s news coverage. “Carlos Slim is an excellent shareholder who fully respects boundaries regarding the independence of our journalism,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “He has never sought to influence what we report.”
Mr. Trump has spoken in ever more apocalyptic tones in recent days as his poll numbers have fallen: describing Mrs. Clinton as deserving incarceration; warning that the election will be rigged; and suggesting that international bankers are colluding to bring about his defeat.
On Friday, he repeated his pledge to prosecute Mrs. Clinton and encouraged his crowd in chants of “Lock her up.” “For what she’s done,” he said, “they should lock her up.”
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