Trump turns to debate to curb campaign meltdown




Getty Images

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will take the stage for their second debate Sunday evening amid an extraordinary political atmosphere.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has faced calls from prominent members of his own party to drop his White House bid, after a recording emerged on Friday of him using vulgar and aggressive language about women in 2005.

It is an unprecedented situation for the nominee of a major party.


Trump has been adamant about not leaving the race, telling The New York Times that he would not do so “in a million years” and insisting he can still win the presidency.

But neither those words, nor the video statement Trump released around midnight Friday, have quelled the sense of crisis that has enveloped his party. Whether he can do anything on the debate stage on Sunday to break the fever remains to be seen.

"I don’t see how he can do any kind of political repair," said Democratic strategist Craig Varoga. "For the good of America, [Clinton] just needs to speak up for all the people in this country who would never approve of this behavior."

By Saturday afternoon, several Republican senators had called for Trump to drop out of the race, including the party’s third-ranking member in the upper chamber, Sen. John Thune (S.D.). And other Republican lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), withdrew their support of the nominee.

Trump’s own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has said he was “offended” by the nominee’s words and decided not to appear at a GOP fundraiser Saturday alongside Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in Trump’s stead.

The situation Trump finds himself in is so grave that it is not immediately clear what would constitute success for him in the debate, which takes place at Washington University in St. Louis Sunday night.

The bombshell tape is sure to come up. In it, Trump spoke in crude terms about his pursuit of an unnamed woman and claimed that his celebrity status enabled him to “do anything” to women, including “grab them by the p---y.”

Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, released a statement on Saturday afternoon calling her husband’s words “unacceptable and offensive to me” but also asserted that it did not “represent the man I know.”

Pence, for his part, has suggested that the debate presents Trump with an opportunity to “show what is in his heart.”

But the prospect that voters will see contrition from Trump on Sunday evening is far from guaranteed.

His late-night video apology included a jab at former President Bill Clinton for his treatment of women and the accusation that “Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”

Trump managed to largely steer clear of diving into that line of attack when faced with sexism accusations at the first debate, but he may choose to go on the offensive this time around. Some fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), have publicly cast doubt on the likely effectiveness of such a tactic.

Sunday’s debate is the only one of the three clashes that will be held in a town hall setting, where the candidates will field questions from audience members. The dynamics of such debates are challenging even under normal circumstances.

For Trump, the dangers seem plain.

If audience members blanch at raising the most shocking elements of the recording on Sunday, the co-moderators, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC News, may be quick to bring up the issue themselves.

And Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, who initially called Trump’s comments “horrific” in a Friday tweet but then fell silent on the issue, will surely use the controversy for all it's worth to attack him, with or without help from the moderators.

The scandal — the most grave of Trump’s furor-filled run for the presidency — comes with only a little more than four weeks to go until Election Day and early voting underway in some states. It is also the nadir of a bleak period for the Republican nominee that began with his performance in his first debate against Clinton on Sept. 26.

He was widely perceived to have lost that encounter. Since then he has extended a feud with a former Miss Universe, been hit with a New York Times exposé on his tax returns, seen his poll ratings dip and become enmeshed in several other disputes.

As of Saturday afternoon, Clinton held a lead of around 3 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average and was well placed in most battleground states. Virtually no one, in either party, denies that Clinton’s lead is likely to grow in the wake of the Trump recording. 

This leaves the former secretary of State in the curious position of being the undisputed front-runner, yet not the center of attention, on Sunday night. 

One thing to watch will be whether Clinton, an audience member or one of the moderators addresses the Trump tape first. The body language between the two will also be scrutinized — some liberal voices on social media have suggested that Clinton should decline to shake hands with Trump.

The Trump tape could have another beneficiary: TV broadcasters. 

Before the latest revelations, it had been assumed that the 84 million people who watched the first Trump-Clinton clash on TV would be the largest audience for any of the three debates.

Now, the audience that will tune in on Sunday evening might even surpass that figure. If it does, it will set a new all-time high for a presidential debate.

The silence of the lambs: Why sheepish GOP leaders have been conspicuously quiet since Donald Trump’s debate debacle Before Monday's debate, top Republicans were starting to vocally support Donald Trump, but since then? Crickets

The silence of the lambs: Why sheepish GOP leaders have been conspicuously quiet since Donald Trump’s debate debacle
Before Monday's debate, top Republicans were starting to vocally support Donald Trump, but since then? Crickets


Mitch McConnell; Paul Ryan (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon/J. Scott Applewhite/Photo montage by Salon)


Early last week, if you squinted hard enough it was possible to see the Republican Party beginning to unite behind presidential nominee Donald Trump. It was not overwhelming support. Nor was it the full-throated endorsement a partisan might want for the party’s nominee. It was more tepid, trending toward lukewarm.


Still, it was possible to read in the narrowing polling gap between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton the possibility that Republicans who had spent months declaring themselves #NeverTrump were now coming home to the GOP. Prominent elected officials like Sen. Marco Rubio, who just a few months nearly broke down in tears over Trump’s success, and radio talk-show host Mark Levin, among others, decided the mogul was the lesser of two evils after all and gave him their grudging endorsements.

For crying out loud, even Ted Cruz endorsed Trump, after the latter had derided Cruz’s wife’s attractiveness and suggested the Texas senator’s father might have been an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. The endorsement was likely a craven career move by Cruz more than it was a sign of newfound warmth towards his party’s nominee. But considering his antics on the stage of the Republican National Convention two months ago, this might as well have been the Camp David accords.

Then came Monday night, and a Trump performance that ranked as likely the worst ever turned in by a major party nominee in a presidential debate. All of a sudden, you could not find anyone besides Rush Limbaugh and congressional back benchers like Marsha Blackburn to defend the GOP’s standard bearer.

For example, RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been missing in action since Monday. Ahead of the debate he tried his hardest to put a positive face on the pile of rotted orange peels in a suit that his party had nominated by suggesting that 14 season finales of Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” had prepared him for the debate. Priebus’ Twitter feed, which he has regularly used to slam Clinton, has been almost entirely silent.

GOP congressional leaders have said as little as possible. House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose relationship with Trump has been tenuous, tried to have it both ways. Hecalled the nominee’s performance “a unique Donald Trump response to the status quo” — but also suggested he should actually, you know, prepare for the next debate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell said Trump did “just fine,” which is what a Southerner says when he means the exact opposite.
McConnell’s caucus wasn’t much more forthcoming. Sen. John McCain, who has almost never met a reporter he wouldn’t chat up, would only say the debate was “interesting.” Sen. Lindsey Graham echoed Ryan by telling Trump to practice more. Rubio tried the time-honored dodge of telling reporters that he had missed the debate because he had been on a plane at the time but would catch the “highlights” later. As the British might say, pull the other one.

About the only well-known Republican to defend Trump, besides Limbaugh, was Cruz. The Texas senator, who seems to have gotten over his alleged hatred of the nominee, lavished praise on him while speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt. But considering how low Cruz’s approval ratings are in Texas, this seems like a transparently desperate move.

If debates are an opportunity to excite your base, then Trump seems to have completely whiffed with the first one. But more than that, it seems that his terrible night may have repelled already-skittish allies who were just starting to finally come around to his candidacy. Now they are distancing themselves as fast as possible, and not worrying about how awkward they might look while doing so.

Meanwhile, newspapers that had not endorsed a Democrat for president in decades or even over a century are endorsing Clinton while calling Trump’s myriad character flaws “disqualifying.” Anonymous leaks from the campaign on Wednesday painted a picture of its staff second-guessing itself and the boss while suggesting that Trump’s kids are unhappy enough to push their father to fire his top lieutenants and start over. And it doesn’t look as if there is anyone in the Republican Party who can step in and smooth things over.

This does not happen with campaigns that are confident of impending victory.

With six weeks to go until the election, it seems likely that the Republican elite will now completely hunker down, smile politely while keeping Trump at arm’s length (so that he doesn’t drag down with him members locked in tight re-election battles) and hope that the GOP can hold onto its Senate majority. Then assuming he goes down to a resounding defeat, the Republican elite can maybe reclaim the party from the virulent Trumpism that has infected it.

It is not much of a plan. But at this point, even a sudden discipline and yen for practice is probably not going to help Trump give even a moderately competent performance in a debate with Clinton. Even if he could suddenly turn into the second coming of Stephen Douglas, this is unlikely to make a difference with the voters. The GOP, after a brief moment of hope, is trying to get clear of the explosion to minimize the damage. We will see if it is a successful effort.