Could this be the end? Multiple extinction-level events rocked the Trump campaign the last 7 days.
Donald Trump just experienced what some are calling “the worst week in presidential campaign history.”
NBC News reported on Sunday that “In what must rank among the worst weeks of any recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump managed to play into almost every one of Democrats’ talking points about him.”
“The combination of multiple damaging stories, all made dramatically worse by the candidate’s impulsive response, may be without precedent,” NBC News later added.
“Almost every day, Trump did something that would send a typical presidential campaign into a tailspin,” NBC News continued, adding that “the Machado story has been so dominant that it overshadowed any number of stories that would be potential extinction-level events for virtually every other major party nominee in history.”
Here’s a brief rundown of Trump’s meltdown and extinction-level events from last week.
I – Monday’s Presidential Debate
Trump started out the weekend the clear loser in the first presidential debate with every single scientific poll showing Hillary Clinton the winner by a large margin. As NBC News reported, Trump “surpassed the 50% threshold on Nate Silver’s prediction model” for the first time on the eve of the debate. However, by Wednesday Clinton was receiving good news from Silver who reported that early post-debate polls suggest Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton can expect to gain in “horse-race polls” over Republican rival Donald Trump over the course of “the next week or so.”
Undecided voters as well as many Trump supporters expressed doubts about Trump following the debate . For example there is Nancy Groux, an undecided Republican, who told The New York Times that “I truly want to like him. I keep looking for something in him. But I can’t have my children grow up and look at him as someone to respect.” Janet Melton, a registered Republican, told The New York Times that she would vote for Clinton were the election to be held today, saying that Clinton was “so much more presidential” than Trump, adding that “I come from a long line of Republican family members who will turn over in their graves.” Other undecided Republicans such as Debbie Windle are taking a different approach, telling The New York Times who said she was considering not voting and Diana Martens told The Times said she might write in a candidate.
II – Trump’s Meltdown Regarding former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado
Responding to Trump’s debate claim that she lacked “stamina,” Clinton pounded him for her well-documented misogyny stating that:
This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men. And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman “Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado and she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.
The next morning Trump launched what would turn into a week-long series of attacks on Machado. As NBC News reports:
- Tuesday: Trump told Fox and Friends that it was “a real problem” when Machado gained significant weight after winning the Miss Universe contest, essentially confirming Clinton’s claims from the night before. He continued his offensive adding that Machado was “the worst we ever had. The worst. The absolute worst. She was impossible. She was the winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem… not only that, her attitude,” Trump said, adding “And Hillary went back into the years and… found the girl and talked about her like she was Mother Teresa, and it wasn’t quite that way, but that’s OK. Hillary has to do what she has to do.”
- Wednesday: Trump returned to Fox News telling Bill O’Reilly that he saved Machado’s job. “She did not do well. She had a lot of difficulty. And, you know, they wanted to fire her. The company itself wanted to fire her. I saved her job … I did that with a number of young ladies,” he told O’Reilly, adding “I saved her job because they wanted to fire her for putting on so much weight, it is a beauty contest. Say what you want, Bill. It’s a beauty contest. I said ‘Don’t do that. Let her try and lose the weight.’ You can imagine? I end up in a position like this. So that’s the way it is … I helped somebody, and this is what you get for helping somebody.”
- Thursday: “Trump’s own campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told ‘The View’ that she had personally reprimanded him for his language regarding women…. Even some of Trump’s surrogates seemed unwilling to defend his comments.” Ben Carson, one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, told MSNBC that “it’s going to be so much better when he begins to focus on the real issues.”
- Friday: Trump launched a hate-filled series of tweets against Machado in the early hours of the morning – at one point calling on his 12+ million followers to “check out [a] sex tape” of the former Miss Universe winner. As NBC New reported: “the sex tape of Machado did not appear to exist. But Buzzfeed that day found a pornographic video by Playboy featuring a brief cameo by Trump in which he poured champagne on a limo with a gaggle of models.” Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, another of Trump’s most prominent supporters, is quoted by NBC News as stating: “You can’t tweet at 3 o’clock in the morning. Period. There’s no excuse. Ever. Not if you’re going to be president of the United States.”
III – Expose Reveals one of Trump’s Companies Violated Cuban Embargo
On Thursday an expose by Newsweek Magazine revealed that one of Trump’s companies had violated the trade embargo with Cuba in violation of federal law.
A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.
Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company, then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, on how to make the venture appear legal by linking it after-the-fact to a charitable effort.
Trump’s own campaign manager Kellyanne Conway appeared to confirm some of the details during a television interview later that day. Asked by “The View” host Paula Faris “So are you denying that his company spent any money in Cuba?” Conway responded “I think they paid money, as I understand from the story, they paid money in 1998. We’re not supposed to talk about years ago when it comes to the Clintons, but with Trump, there is no statute of limitations.”
IV – Expose Reveals Trump May Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades
Another explosive expose rocked the media on Saturday – this time via The New York Times who reported on Saturday that Trump may have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades.
As The New York Times reports:
Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.
The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.
As NBC News reports: “The New York Times story alone, which both reported that Trump declared he had lost a staggering $916 million in 1995 tax forms, and that experts believe that loss could have allowed him to pay no federal income taxes for up to 18 years, fed into three lines of attack that Hillary Clinton had used to needle him in Monday’s debate.”
- “That his refusal to release his taxes suggested he was concealing something important.”
- “That his returns might show his business acumen was overstated.”
- “That he paid little or no taxes despite his vast wealth.”
V – Trump Suffers Meltdown During Pennsylvania Speech on Saturday
As Liberals Unite reported early this morning, “Donald Trump apparently isn’t reacting well to his bad week. It showed in his performance at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday.”
The cascading bad news seems to have rattled the Republican nominee. When he arrived at the rally, an hour and 40 minutes late, he could not or would not stay on script. He had a nine-sentence statement to read about Hillary Clinton, but every time he finished a sentence, he strayed off onto tangents — mocking Bernie Sanders, trashing CNN, making an incoherent statement about what Clinton thinks of millennials.
Trump sounded particularly unhinged during his “repeated and varied descriptions of Clinton.”
Going beyond his usual “crooked-Hillary” slur, Trump claimed: “She could be crazy. She could actually be crazy.”
- He completely derailed during a rant – presumably about her recent tweets, telling the crowd: “How many people have acid-washed or bleached a tweet? How many? That you deleted? So you deleted it but that’s not good enough. No, this is getting crazy. Our country is becoming a third-world country.”
- He mocked Clinton’s near-collapse from pneumonia at the 9/11 monument, stating that: “She has been a disaster. Here’s a woman she’s supposed to fight all these different things and she can’t make it 15 feet to her car. Give me a break.”
- Worse yet, as NBC News reports: “Already behaving erratically since his debate on Monday, … [Trump] fired off the most grotesque, personal, and fact-free attack at the nominee yet. ‘Hillary Clinton’s only loyalty is to her financial contributors and to herself,’ Trump said of the first female major party nominee. ‘I don’t even think she’s loyal to Bill, you wanna know the truth. And really folks really, why should she be, right? Why should she be?'”
VI through X – Misc. Extinction-Level Events Plaguing the Trump Campaign
The stories above have overshadowed other events that NBC News explains “would be potential extinction-level events for virtually every other major party nominee in history.”
VI – There is the newly released investigation by Forbes concluded that the value of Donald Trump’s assets has fallen $800 million from this time last year. Forbes investigation revealed that “Of the 28 assets or asset classes scrutinized by FORBES, 18 declined in value, including his trademark Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, his downtown jewel 40 Wall Street and Mar-a-Lago, his private beachfront club in Palm Beach.”
VII – As NBC News reports: “There was Trump’s rambling debate answer on nuclear weapons, where he seemed to announce what would be a historic shift towards a ‘no first use’ policy only to contradict himself in the next sentence, alarming national security experts days later.”
VIII – “The Washington Post continued its investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. The Post has already found compelling evidence Trump previously violated the law by using the foundation to settle lawsuits against his private businesses,” NBC continued.
IX – “USA Today, the country’s widest circulation newspaper, broke with its 34-year policy of neutrality in the presidential race to declare Trump ‘unfit for the presidency.’ Several historically Republican newspapers endorsed Clinton outright, along with an editorial board member at the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz.”
X – AND…. as NBC News adds: “an array of old comments by Trump about women over the years, from ogling and hiring a teenage waitress to promising his then-17 year old daughter he wouldn’t date anyone younger than her, resurfaced in various outlets. As did a lawsuit alleging he demanded unattractive women working at one of his golf resorts be fired and replaced with prettier women.”
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