Is the Presidential election done? On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, facing new sexual-assault accusations, cancelled an interview with one of his most stalwart supporters, Sean Hannity, of Fox News. Other news networks reported that they were having a hard time finding guests willing to defend Trump on air. Some commentators went as far as suggesting that Trump might skip the third Presidential debate, which is scheduled for Wednesday, or maybe even drop out of the race entirely.
On Thursday afternoon, Trump indicated he would fight on. “I take all of these slings and arrows for you,” he said at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. “I take them for our movement, so that we can have our country back.” Trump dismissed the new allegations against him, declaring, “These claims are all fabricated. They are pure fiction.” He criticized the appearance of one of his female accusers, a reporter for People magazine, telling the crowd, “Look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.” And he also claimed he was the victim of an organized plot, saying, “This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen.”
With three and a half weeks left until Election Day, Trump’s campaign has blown up in a manner never witnessed before. As a competitive contest, the election almost certainly ended last Friday afternoon, when the Washington Post published its blockbuster article about Trump’s 2005 hot-mic conversation with “Access Hollywood” ’s Billy Bush. Even before the Post story came out, the polls had already turned against the Republican candidate, and he looked to be in serious trouble. After the “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump could be heard boasting about kissing women unbidden and groping their genitals, was put in front of voters, Trump’s condition deteriorated from serious to critical. Now it is terminal.
One way to gauge the video’s effect is to look at a poll from Wisconsin that Marquette University carried out between Thursday and Sunday. It was a telephone survey, and Thursday’s interviews indicated that Trump and Hillary Clinton were running pretty much level in the state: Trump was at forty-one per cent support, and Clinton was at forty per cent. Friday’s calls showed Clinton leading Trump by six points: forty-four per cent to thirty-eight per cent. The interviews conducted over the weekend—on Saturday and Sunday—showed Clinton leading by nineteen points: forty-nine per cent to thirty per cent. This was a seismic shift. Overnight, Trump’s support among Wisconsin women collapsed, while self-identified independents fled, too.
Polling from other parts of the country was no less alarming for Trump. A new Bloomberg poll from Pennsylvania, a state he must win to stay competitive in the Electoral College, shows him trailing by nine percentage points. The margin is twenty-eight points in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where statewide elections are often decided. Sixty per cent of the respondents to the survey said the “Access Hollywood” tape bothered them a lot; in the Philly suburbs, the figure was seventy-six per cent.
Tellingly, just one in four of Trump’s supporters in Pennsylvania said the tape concerned them greatly. That’s consistent with the evidence from national polls taken since last Friday, which have shown Trump polling at just under forty per cent. His core supporters haven’t deserted him en masse: many of them were enthused by his aggressive performance at the second Presidential debate, on Sunday night. But the chances of Trump catching up with Clinton and then amassing two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College on Election Day are very slim, and have diminished greatly. This fact is reflected in the polls-based forecasting models, some of which now estimate the probability of a Clinton victory at ninety-five per cent, or even higher.
It is in this context—a race that is basically done, but not quite over—that Trump’s latest rhetoric and the responses to it need to be viewed. In the past few days, the de-facto leader of Trump’s party, Paul Ryan, has all but deserted him. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, has grown so confident that it has made plans to shift some resources to congressional races. At the same time, the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against Trump have mounted.
On Wednesday night, the Times published an article quoting a retired businesswoman, Jessica Leeds, who accused Trump of assaulting her on an airline flight in 1980. She described Trump grabbing her breasts and trying to put his hands up her skirt. “His hands were everywhere,” Leeds said. The authors of the Times article, Meghan Twohey and Michael Barbaro, also interviewed a younger woman, Rachel Crooks, who used to work for a company based in Trump Tower. In 2005, Crooks said, Trump accosted her in an elevator and kissed her on the lips.
Also on Wednesday, the Palm Beach Post published claims by a third woman, Mindy McGillivray, who said that Trump grabbed her buttocks in 2003 at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. “It was pretty close to the center of my butt,” McGillivray recalled. “I was startled. I jumped.’’ People magazine published its own article, a firsthand account from one of its reporters, Natasha Stoynoff, who alleged that Trump had attacked her in December, 2005, also at Mar-a-Lago, where she had gone to interview him and his pregnant wife, Melania, for a story about their first wedding anniversary. When Melania left her and Trump alone at one point, Stoynoff wrote, Trump offered to show her around, saying there was one room in particular he wanted to show her. Once inside, she wrote, Trump “shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”
Late Wednesday, a lawyer for Trump, Marc E. Kasowitz, wrote to the Times demanding a retraction of its article and threatening to sue for libel. The Times refused, saying it had “published newsworthy information about a subject of deep public concern.” In any case, Trump can’t prevent more women from coming forward, and he can’t do anything, either, about the tremendous damage that has already been done to his campaign. The incidents described in the Times and the other outlets cover a twenty-five-year period. More and more, it looks like the Republican Presidential candidate may be a serial sexual predator.
Earlier this week, Paul Ryan announced to colleagues that he would focus his efforts between now and Election Day on maintaining the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. In doing so, he appeared to concede that the Presidential race was lost. Even Trump himself appears increasingly resigned to the fact that he isn’t going to win. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal, citing Trump’s advisers and other Republican sources, reported that the candidate had “effectively given up the conventional wisdom of trying to reach voters far outside his core of support.” Rather than reaching out to moderates, independents, and other groups he would need to bring over to win a majority in November, the Journal article said, Trump now “plans to renew the nationalist themes that built his base and amplify his no-holds-barred attacks against Hillary Clinton to try to depress Democratic voter turnout.”
Such a blitzkrieg strategy makes no sense, of course. If there is one thing that is guaranteed to get Democrats to the polls, it is the sight of Trump going around the country for the next three and half weeks inciting bigotry and racial hatred, launching personal attacks on his opponents, and generally acting like a deranged person. But, as my colleague Ryan Lizza pointed out on Wednesday, there is reason to believe that Trump’s true motivation is no longer winning: it is finding someone to blame for his upcoming defeat.
Trump is now casting about, trying to fill this role. Just about anybody will do, be it Ryan and the Republican establishment, the Clinton campaign, the media, or the wealthy donors backing his opponent. In Trump’s speech in West Palm Beach, which elevated his conspiratorial rhetoric to new levels of rabble-rousing and paranoia, he lumped all these groups together and portrayed himself as the victim of “a small handful of special global interests rigging the system.” Then he went on:
This is reality. You know it, they know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it. The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, rapist, xenophobe, and morally deformed. They will attack you. They will slander you. They will seek to destroy your career and your family. They will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that.
If this were a boxing match, the referee would stop the fight and send Trump back to his corner. Since there are no T.K.O.s in politics, we’ll have to put up with it for another few weeks. Some of the tension may have gone out of the race. But with Trump busy whipping things up, the level of acrimony and bile is still building.