New York Daily News
October 10, 2016
The threatening rage displayed by Donald Trump when nearly stalking Hillary Clinton in their second debate has no place in American politics, let alone in the White House.
Had he confronted a man on the stage, it is inconceivable that Trump would have sneeringly loomed behind his rival, and he certainly would not have gotten away as easily with dismissing his taped description of sexual assaults as “locker room” talk. A male candidate could have called out Trump’s lie with authority.
Trump’s attempt to tough it out — using “tough” in the meanest sense of the word — was the mark of a coward who is afraid to stand before the voters as the repulsive man he is. Yet it still revealed the ugliness of his character with his seething body language and gestures.
Those were natural for a man who looks down on women as sexual playthings and has publicly mocked the appearance of female critics and challengers. He respects women only to the extent that they do what he pleases.
Trump is finally repulsing even the Republican establishment. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Monday told fellow Republicans that he can no longer defend, and will not campaign alongside, the man atop the party’s ticket.
Ryan lacked the guts to yank his endorsement, as dozens of GOP senators, congressmen and governors have, but it was nonetheless an extraordinary rebuke from the nation’s most powerful Republican less than a month before Election Day.
Trumpbots are hunkering down nevertheless, declaring his Sunday-night debate performance as some sort of triumph of will.
It was, in fact, 90 minutes of fury during which Trump barked lies, rising to a crescendo in which he glowered that, as President, he would imprison Clinton, whom he called “the devil.”
Following Hillary Clinton’s insistence that a man with Trump’s temperament must not be “in charge of the law in our country,” he chillingly lowered the U.S. to banana republic, interjecting:
“Because you would be in jail.”
Having devoted their careers to due process, the rule of law, and America’s constitutional standards, Republican federal prosecutors Monday attacked Trump’s unprecedented pledge as “terrifying” and “abhorrent.”
In another show of cowardice, Trump admitted that he had paid no federal income taxes for years — only after questioners dragged the confession out of him, while he still refuses to release his returns.
Fabrication after fabrication left no doubt that a President Trump would use all the power at his fingertips to destroy political foes with dirty lies.
He again said that Clinton had started the racist lie that President Obama was born outside the United States. Entirely false.
He claimed that, while working as a court-appointed defense lawyer in 1975, Clinton got the charges dropped against an accused rapist and laughed at the 12-year-old victim. A felonious lie.
In fact, the prosecution mishandled evidence, leading the client to take a plea deal for a lesser sentence — and, of course, Clinton never laughed at the child.
Trump again spouted self-serving revisionism about Iraq, fabricating opposition for a war he supported.
He claimed that “many people” saw bombs “all over the apartment in San Bernardino” where two Islamist terrorists lived. Lie.
He denied having asked people to look for a former beauty queen’s sex tape — but that’s exactly what he did (“check out sex tape”) in an early-morning tweet aimed to smear her as “disgusting.”
He said the U.S. economy is growing at a sluggish 1% per year. False, and revealing of how badly Trump yearns for bleak conditions.
Donald Trump, it seems, has even less respect for the truth than he does for women.
The horrifying sight of an American presidential candidate transforming, live before tens of millions of television viewers, into a cyclone of perfidious rage has two upsides.
More than ever, it clarifies the stakes in the November election. And it presents the country with a plausible new theory for why Trump has refused to release full medical records: The man is rabid.
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