Littwin: Trump’s descent into madness wasn’t a dream after all

Donald Trump was up early, or maybe he was up late — or maybe he hadn’t slept at all, or maybe he hasn’t slept in weeks.

We don’t know. What we do know is that while much of America presumably slept, Donald Trump was up and apparently too wide awake, banging away at The Twitter, where his millions of followers — and how apt the word “followers” seems — could see their leader gone mad.

How else to describe the would-be leader of the free world when he suggests that we check out an apparently nonexistent sex tape of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe and his present-day nemesis, to prove his point that … well, it doesn’t prove any point. But Trump wants to discredit Machado because last Monday — light years ago in campaign time — Hillary Clinton pointed out that Trump had once fat-shamed the beauty queen by calling her Miss Piggy.

It was a disastrous debate for Trump. But Trump, instead of studying for the next debate, just wants to re-litigate the last one, calling it rigged and unfair, blaming the microphone and blaming The Google, all the while trying to wriggle free from the Miss Universe trap that Clinton laid for him.

Which is why Trump was back to his old tricks, doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on his latest misstep, unable to let it go, unwilling to take advice from the people he pays to give him advice, incapable of controlling his most basic, and basest, impulses.

This was Donald Trump letting Donald Trump be Donald Trump.

And so came the tweets, one after the other, one more embarrassing than the last, and the only question is who should be more embarrassed — Trump or the people planning to vote for him.

Here’s my favorite of the tweets:

It’s all Trump, who likes to boast of his sexual prowess, who used the debate stage to draw attention to his, uh, manhood, who releases his testosterone numbers but not his tax returns, calling Machado “disgusting” (she once posed for Playboy) as he heads into his latest conspiracy theory: that Clinton, many months ago, must have plotted the whole thing, probably with the help of whoever forged Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Don’t laugh. It’s not funny.

Nothing about Trump is funny.

All right, some things are funny. I mean, Newt Gingrich has joined Trump in the fat-shaming game. Yes, Newt Gingrich. Not that there isn’t precedent here. It was Newt Gingrich who went after Bill Clinton for adultery. (And now it’s Rudy Giuliani who wants Trump to take on Clinton’s sex scandals, which is funny, if only in a weird, sick, twisted, Trump-Gingrich-Giuliani way.)

In any case, it should go without saying that it doesn’t make a bit of difference what Machado has or hasn’t done with her life. It doesn’t change the fact that Trump called her “Miss Piggy” for gaining weight or that he called her “Miss Housekeeping” because she is Latina. You’ll notice that Trump hasn’t denied either.

But what can’t be overlooked is the turn in Trump’s fortunes. It began with his refusal to do serious debate prep for Monday’s debate, and it continues as he turns a one- or two-day story into a weeklong story, just as he did with the Gold Star Khan family story. His advisers have said (anonymously, of course) that Trump was too distracted to study for the debate, that he ignored lines of attack that had been prepared for him. They’ve said he is convinced he won this debate, just as he was convinced he won all the GOP debates, citing insta-online fan polls that are, not to put too fine a point on it, worthless.

The most dependably Republican and conservative editorial boards in the country are snubbing Trump. The Arizona Republic has endorsed a Democrat for the first time in its history. The Detroit News endorsed Gary Johnson, as did the Richmond Times-Dispatch. USA Today has advised its readers not to vote for “ill-equipped” Trump, “a serial liar” who “traffics in prejudice.”

According to Nate Silver, as of this writing, there have been 11 swing-state polls released since the debate Monday and Clinton is leading (or, to put it another way, Trump is trailing) in all of them.

Editorial boards are not going to decide this race, and polls are only a snapshot. But before the debate, Silver had put Trump’s chances of winning the presidency at over 40 percent. Now, his odds favor Clinton 2-to-1.

Meanwhile, Clinton got to the heart of the matter with a much-later-in-the-morning tweet of her own:

It’s a tough but fair question, but I’d put it another way.

What kind of nation could ever sleep again if it elected that kind of man its president?

Photo credit: clurichaun, Creative Commons, Flickr 

3 COMMENTS

  1. You struck gold again, Mike Littwin…If only this article could become required reading for all Americans… Please don’t stop! Keep pouring the fuel on the fire…hammer it home…Yes, yes, yes…

  2. As of my last look, Trump has been endorsed by one “newspaper” — the National Enquirer. That equals an explicit “non-endorsement” of Donald Trump — USA Today breaking a 34 year no-endorsement policy.

    Gary Johnson has been endorsed by 4.

    Clinton has been endorsed by at least 4 papers who haven’t endorsed a Democrat in decades.

  3. First things first, let me answer Mrs. Clinton’s question: “What kind of man stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?”

    That’s easy, the kind of man you married. The kind of man who has been accused by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick and Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky et al. of either sexual harassment or rape. You could look it up.

    Now let me answer Mr. Littwin’s question: “What kind of nation could ever sleep again if it elected that kind of man its president? “

    You can get some sleep now because the United States has already elected that kind of man, in 1992 and again in 1996.

    Now it’s my turn to ask a question: What kind of woman remains married to a serial philandering, morally bereft, sexual predator solely to reach a goal that, on her own, she could never, ever in a million years achieve?

    There’s a word for that kind of woman in the dictionary which should be easy to find if you start from the back.

    And there’s this from the Weekly Standard:

    “When, for instance, Bill Clinton first planned to run for president, in 1988, a political enemy threatened to make public a list of Bill’s extramarital lovers. The list was very long. Sheehy says Hillary Clinton deputized two of her law partners, Webb Hubbell and Vincent Foster, to invite the women one by one into the imposing Little Rock offices of their law firm, the largest in the state. There the two lawyers confronted the women and generously offered to give them free legal counsel if the list was made public. Hillary attended at least one of the meetings.

    It’s not hard to imagine the intimidation the women must have felt in the presence of such a display of legal firepower. And the tactic worked, as Clinton tactics usually do. None of the women talked. That steely determination comes in handy.”

    This from the American Spectator:

    “Donald, she has a name,” Hillary Clinton announced at Monday’s presidential debate. “Her name is Alicia Machado. And she has become a U.S. citizen and you can bet she is going to vote this November.”

    Hillary, they have many names. Their names are Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Eileen Wellstone, Sally Perdue, Elizabeth Gracen, Carolyn Moffet, Monica Lewinsky, and others too numerous to list. And although I can’t confirm if the foreign-born among them all hold citizenship, one bets that few cast votes for his enabler this November.

    Bill Clinton merely harassed, assaulted, and raped numerous women over the years.”

    How could any responsible news organization—-especially one claiming to “take the role of journalism as a public trust very seriously”—-expect the author of the following statement to provide an unbiased look at anything involving Mr. Trump?

    “You can call Trump a demagogue, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a bigot, a sexist, an authoritarian, a boor, a crypto-fascist and the least-prepared person ever to be nominated by a major party..” – Mike Littwin

    The answer, of course, is you couldn’t. But we’re not talking here about a responsible news organization, we’re talking about the Colorado Independent—-journalism’s version of the Washington Generals. The CI embraces Mr. Littwin in part because there aren’t many columnists willing to work for sub-minimum wage and in part because Mr. Littwin reflects the view of everyone on the CI staff.

    But what you read in the CI isn’t journalism—-or even close—- it’s radical left-wing agitprop.

    For example, last Tuesday Mr. Littwin said “the polls agreed” that Mrs. Clinton had won Monday’s debate. Which polls? He didn’t say. A poll conducted by Time had Mr. Trump winning 58 to 42. A CBS New York poll had Mr. Trump with 24,000 votes to Mrs. Clinton’s 17 ,000. Slate had Mr. Trump winning 54 to 46. The Las Vegas Sun had Trump winning 81 to 19.

    Here’s what the New York Post said:

    “The first Clinton-Trump debate was roughly a draw — which is bad news for her, because she needs to turn this race around, and she failed.
    Clinton was on the attack most of the night, with the marked help of moderator Lester Holt. But she didn’t score any body blows — nor remotely offer a rationale for her candidacy beyond he’s just too dangerous, a case she failed to make.”

    And to date the only reason Mr. Littwin has given for supporting Mrs. Clinton is, well, she’s not Donald Trump. Maybe because that’s all Mr. Littwin has to offer. And Mr. Littwin has yet to explain why, with all of Mr. Trumps so-called shortcomings(see above), Mrs. Clinton is doing so poorly. How poorly? Well, Kim Kardashian is reportedly reconsidering her coveted endorsement of Mrs. Clinton. If Mrs. Clinton loses that endorsement it’s time to abandon ship!

    Three days after proudly announcing “the polls agreed” Mrs, Clinton had won the debate Mr. Littwin says “polls are only a snapshot.” and three days after saying “But the question now haunting the Clinton camp — at least until the next real round of polls — is whether it mattered. Because if the polls — now, remarkably, essentially tied — show it didn’t matter or it didn’t matter much, you have to wonder if anything would or could.”

    So are polls important or not? Or does it depend on the day of the week?

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    “As Hillary Clinton’s health moves from the fringes to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, there’s a lot we still don’t know about her scare this weekend.
    Here’s what we do know: Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. During a Sept. 11 memorial event on Sunday at Ground Zero, she was unsteady and clearly needed help getting into a van after becoming “overheated and dehydrated.” And Clinton canceled a planned to trip to California for Monday while she rests at home.” – NBC News

    “After a coughing fit…..(Hillary) Clinton chose to not tell the public that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.
    Instead, the coughing had been attributed to seasonal allergies.
    Why not just admit the pneumonia? It’s not as if there’s a stigma to catching it. After all, Hillary Clinton’s full-time job right now is rushing from place to place on those tube-shaped petri dishes called airplanes, speaking for hours on end with little sleep, and then diving into crowds of often unwashed deplorables thrusting babies into her face.” NY Daily News

    Mother Nature once again graced the city with gorgeous weather for the 9/11 memorial ceremonies — yet Hillary Clinton was somehow overcome by the mild, low-80s temperatures, and left early in obvious distress.
    Clinton’s health is no longer a background issue in the presidential race.
    The footage of her entry to her ride out is especially troubling: She’s leaning oddly backward as she waits, and plainly almost collapses as she moves toward the vehicle; a mob of aides then conveys her inside.
    Also telling is that her staff avoided alerting the press that travels with her — and were left to catch up after noticing her missing. Clinton’s brief walkabout some 90 minutes later, after she’d rested in daughter Chelsea’s apartment, settles nothing. Nor does word late Sunday that she has pneumonia.
    We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too. Maybe her repeated memory failures when the FBI interviewed her over her email abuses were actually real, rather than dodges of questions she didn’t dare answer truthfully. – NY Post

    “’Cause I don’t have no use
    For what you loosely call the truth” – Tina Turner

    Greenlight a Vet
    Folds of Honor
    Special Operations Warriors Foundation
    Garysinisefoundation.org
    Veterans Day – November 11, 2016

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