THIS MEANS WAR
spread through his grassroots support base and led to his triumph in the primaries.
Trump again yesterday cast himself as their hero – the man who would take “all the slings and arrows” for the people.
He referenced Brexit, saying the people had risen up and taken power back. He said that needed to happen in America to fend off the “disenfranchisement of working people”.
Yesterday’s attack on the establishment came just days after Trump declared he would fight the election the way he wanted to.
It was a “let Trump be Trump” move that he and his advisers – such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani – hope will pay dividends.
“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted earlier this week.
He even seemed to praise the Democrats at the expense of his own party.
“With the exception of cheating Bernie out of the nom the dems have always proven to be far more loyal to each other than the Republicans.”
He then took aim at one of the top Republicans: “Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty. Disloyal Rs are far more difficult than crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!”.
There had been rumblings of tension between Republicans who supported Trump’s candidacy and those who didn’t.
But in Ohio in July, when the Republican party met to formally endorse Trump at its national convention they left resolving to put the questions behind them.
They were united in their hatred for Clinton, resolving that winning was more important than arguing over a candidate who won the primaries fair and square.
The events of this week, however, negate all that.
If Trump loses, he will leave behind a deeply divided party – those who believed he was not supported by the party chiefs, and those who believed he never should have been the nominee.
Trump is floundering in the polls – behind nationally, and languishing in a trio of swing state polls released this week.
Most analysts see only a limited path for him to claim enough of the electoral college to take the White House.
The slide for Trump started in the first debate.
He went into it riding high – Clinton had just been dragged through her pneumonia scandal and had caused an outcry by labelling Trump supporters as “deplorables”.
But suddenly, as she outtalked him in front of millions of TV viewers, his fortunes shifted.
The next blow was his 1995 tax return, which revealed he’d written off a loss of $916 million and probably hadn’t paid taxes for nearly 20 years.
It was a big slap in the face to those working-class voters who have flocked to him and had struggled to pay their own taxes.
And so it was that Trump was already down in the polls when the grand October surprise finally dropped – remarks captured from 2005 on hot mic in which he bragged how his star status allowed him to grab women.
This series of blows brings Trump to where he is today. The Trump camp – with just over three weeks to go – is facing a narrowing window of opportunity to right the ship.
And so, the campaign is doing what it knows best – reverting to the full aggressive mode that first saw Trump surge to early popularity.
Trump believes that by stirring up enough disdain for the political establishment and enough hate for Clinton, he can get enough voters to stay at home on November 8.
It is, in true Trump style, a high-risk strategy.