And the crazy campaign just continues! Recently, a news story about another email scandal involving Hillary Clinton and unsavory political ties with the Clinton Foundation was buried in the news when Donald Trump continued his trend of saying at least one horrid and offensive thing every other day. And even for him this was a doozy: at a rally, referring to Clinton, he intoned "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know." So, once again into uncharted waters we go as a Presidential candidate appears to be openly calling for the assassination of his opponent. Inevitably, his spokespeople have taken to the airwaves, saying that he was referring to the unity that Second Amendment voters have. This somewhat absurd defense implies somehow pro gun voters will stop Clinton from appointing judges after she's already been elected. More importantly, that defense discounts the way Trump said these words, with a smug shrug and a smile, obviously loving the joke and the crowd's reaction, disregarding the consequences. This is, after all, a man whom has ridiculed a handicapped reporter and blithely calls Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers. He knew damn well what he meant.
A short time later he made another speech in which he called President Obama "the founder of ISIS." Once again implying that our president is somehow a Muslim with terrorist sympathies. At first he tried to defend these statements, and then called them "sarcasm"(!) in a tweet, to once again double down at another rally by saying, “Obviously I’m being sarcastic. Then — but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you.” Clearly this man is unhinged, lurching from one offensive statement to another without any thought other than his own self promotion.
Thankfully, the American public seems to have figured this out, as more and more polls have shown him falling further and further behind Clinton both nationally and state by state (he may even lose the Republican stronghold of Utah!). An anonymous Iowa Republican put it this way “Trump is under performing so comprehensively across states and demographics it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America!’ But in 2016, stranger things have happened." Meanwhile, many prominent Republicans have been moving away from him; recently 50 Republican National Security Officers signed a petition questioning his fitness. While Trump loves to brag about the fact that he received almost 14 million votes in the primary, the highest number for any Republican primary candidate in modern history, he doesn't seem to realize that there's a long climb to the 65.9 million that Obama got in 2012 to win the national election.
With realization (and poll numbers) slowly dawning on him, Trump has taken a new tact and has started to say the system is "rigged", and that he thinks Clinton will somehow steal the election. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania he said, " The only way we can lose, in my opinion -- and I really mean this, Pennsylvania -- is if cheating goes on. I really believe it." This in a state that hasn't voted Republican since 1988. As before with the Second Amendment comments, he is entering dangerous territory; if Trump loses a close election and screams that it's stolen, there could be some angry, even violent responses in the country, especially when one considers the kind of people that show up at his rallies. This is why he doesn't just have to lose, he has to lose by a landslide, so that his tantrums about the vote being stolen will look foolish even to his supporters. So, Hillary's latest email scandal is nothing compared to the danger of this clown becoming the leader of the free world. Let's hope for the most lopsided election since Reagan crushed Mondale in 1984.
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