President Predator

“If you can’t stand up for women and unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you,” wrote conservative activist Marybeth Glenn. “I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, and you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.”

Trump still draws thousands of supporters to his rallies, including plenty of women. At a recent event in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a man who had come with his wife and three children wore a T-shirt reading “She’s A C***, Vote For Trump.” Other popular shirts and badges include Life’s A Bitch, Don’t Vote For One, and Hillary For Prison.

The gender gap in public opinion polls is startling. According to polling analyst Nate Silver, if only men were allowed to vote, Trump would win comfortably despite the revelations about his sexual misconduct. If only women could cast a ballot, the resulting landslide victory for Clinton would redraw the electoral map, confining the Republican party to a handful of states in the Deep South and the western mountains.

At the second presidential debate, Trump was asked by moderator Anderson Cooper whether he had ever kissed or groped a woman without her consent. He dismissed his boasts to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about grabbing women “by the p***y” and that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” as “locker room talk”, but Cooper persisted, and got a straight answer at the third attempt: “No, I have not.”

Several women have since come forward to say, actually, “Yes, he did”. Jessica Leeds, whose story about Trump grabbing her breasts and trying to put his hand up her skirt while on a plane was published in the New York Times, said his response at the debate made her so angry she decided to go public after decades of keeping the secret from all but her closest friends. Right-wing media outlets promptly published her address and phone number – it is no wonder she waited so long.

Taggart McDowell, a former Miss USA contestant, told NBC News that Trump kissed her on the lips uninvited. Receptionist Rachel Crooks accused him of doing the same in the lift at Trump Tower. Four contestants at Miss Teen USA 1997 said he walked into their dressing room unannounced while they were changing.

Writer Natasha Stoynoff was sent to Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in 2005 by People magazine to write a puff piece about the first anniversary of his wedding to Melania Knauss. She wrote that on the pretence of showing her around, Trump got her alone in a room and closed the door: “I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat.”

More women will tell their stories before election day, and it is possible that more tapes will emerge, too. Bill Pruitt, a producer on Trump’s hit show, The Apprentice, has claimed that there are “far worse” clips in the vault. On Wednesday, CBS aired a segment from Entertainment Tonight’s 1992 Christmas Special, in which Trump talks to a pre-pubescent girl and then turns to address the camera: “I’ll be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

Republican legislators are in a no-win situation: they can denounce Trump’s behaviour in strong terms and risk a backlash from his base, or tacitly condone it and alienate swing voters. Many are performing exquisite contortions in an attempt to have it both ways.

Senator Richard Burr promised to watch Trump’s “level of contrition” before deciding whether to withdraw his endorsement. Senators John Thune and Debra Fischer called on Trump to withdraw and then back-pedalled three days later. On a conference call with reporters, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that he would not campaign for or defend Trump, but would still vote for him. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Five of the Republican party’s six female senators have withdrawn their support, compared to just 12 of its 48 male senators. In the House of Representatives, one in three Republican women have unendorsed Trump, but only one in nine men.

Trump, naturally, has responded by lashing out at his critics in the party: “So many self-righteous hypocrites. Watch their poll numbers – and elections – go down!” Addressing his 12 million followers on Twitter, he suggested that he would be better off without “disloyal Rs” – Republicans – such as Ryan and Senator John McCain in his camp: “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.”

In a recent YouGov poll, Trump’s net favourability rating among Republican primary voters – the number of respondents with a positive opinion of him minus those who viewed him negatively – was +36 per cent. Ryan’s was +16 per cent. Trump has the largest and most passionate following in the party, but appears not to care whether they vote Republican in congressional races.

His spokesperson Katrina Pierson tweeted a veiled warning to other Republicans also up for election for various offices in November, saying: “I can’t keep my phone charged due to the mass volume of texts from people all over the country who will #VoteTrump but (down) ballot not so much.” In the National Review, Ben Shapiro accused Trump of initiating “a full-scale war against active Republican candidates simply to gratify his ego, blistered from a lifetime of emotional masturbation”.

Trump retains the support of the most prominent Evangelical Christian leaders, but his enthusiasm for the cardinal vices has not gone unnoticed in the pews. In Christianity Today, editor Andy Crouch quoted Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, warning them of the perils of sinful behaviour: “Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.’ This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date.”

On CNN, Jerry Falwell Jr, president of the world’s largest Christian college, Liberty University, insisted Trump is “a changed man,” adding that “we’re not electing a pastor.”

In response, a group of students calling themselves Liberty United Against Trump released a statement saying: “[We] are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history. Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him.”

In a PRRI/Atlantic poll conducted after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, two-thirds of Evangelical voters said they would still back Trump, but white Protestants and Catholics were evenly split. A Reuters survey showed his lead among Evangelicals at just 1 per cent, down from 12 per cent in July.

Mormons are even less enthused by his candidacy. In Utah, a state that last picked a Democrat for president in 1964, a recent Y2 Analytics poll showed Trump and Clinton running neck and neck at 26 per cent, with independent candidate Evan McMullin at 22 per cent and libertarian Gary Johnson at 14 per cent.

Clinton’s campaign is diverting its resources from the swing states of Colorado and Virginia to reliably red Arizona and Georgia – a clear sign that it is confident of victory. In her speeches, she has started going after Republicans down the ballot, aware there is an opportunity to capture the Senate and even the House of Representatives (although this remains unlikely due to gerrymandered districts drawn up by Republicans).

In Florida, for instance, she criticised Senator Marco Rubio, who is running for re-election, for not taking the threat of global warming seriously: “It is an unacceptable response for Marco Rubio, when asked about climate change, to say, ‘I’m not a scientist’.”

Rubio has a four-point lead over his Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy. Among the same pool of voters, Clinton leads Trump by three. In Ohio, where Republican Rob Portman’s margin remains in double digits, she has pulled ahead of Trump in the latest polls.

This would suggest the presidential election has become a referendum on Trump’s personality and that talk of an ideological schism in the Republican party has been overstated, but if his supporters punish “disloyal Rs”, or moderates judge him unfit for office and stay away, it will result in electoral catastrophe all the same.

Trump has been preparing to dispute the outcome for weeks, issuing dark warnings that “other communities” will commit election fraud. At the Wilkes-Barre rally, he said: “I hear these horror shows, and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us ... and everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

On Thursday, at a campaign event in West Palm Beach, Florida, he dismissed the allegations of sexual assault against him as “pure fiction” and “outright lies,” and described a vast conspiracy to keep American workers down and prevent them from exercising their democratic rights.

His targets included the Clintons, the political establishment and, most of all, the corporate media. “Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed. They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family,” he claimed.

Among Trumps’ accusers are Cassandra Searles, who says he groped her from behind and invited her back to his hotel room; Jill Harth, who says he groped her in his daughter’s bedroom; Summer Zervos, a former candidate on The Apprentice, who says he invited her to a hotel to discuss a job only to grope and “aggressively” kiss her; and Kristin Anderson, who says he touched her through her underwear in a nightclub. Liars all, according to Trump. And anyway, he added with a misogynistic flourish, some of these women “wouldn’t be my first choice, let’s put it that way”.

In Florida, Trump put the Clintons at the centre of the “conspiracy” he perceives against him. “We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”

The transcripts showed Clinton pandering to bankers, but nothing worse. The speech was a classic of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a term coined by historian Richard J Hofstadter in an influential essay published in 1964, shortly after conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater beat moderate Nelson Rockefeller to win the Republican nomination.

In that year’s presidential election, Goldwater won 38.4 per cent of the vote and just six states, all in the Deep South. In an election without a strong third-party candidate, only Democrat George McGovern has fared worse in the modern era, winning 37.5 per cent in 1972. This is the sort of drubbing that Trump is looking at, unless WikiLeaks has something truly devastating up its sleeve. Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, once remarked to conservative writer Ronald Radosh: “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

No matter how resoundingly Trump is defeated, there will be no holding back the anger he has unleashed.