Sex-tape talk sullies campaign

GRAND RAPIDS: Donald Trump is encouraging voters to check out a “sex tape’’ featuring the former beauty queen with whom he’s feuding. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is suggesting that a better rental is the adult film in which Mr Trump himself appears.

With the presidential campaign taking a sordid turn on Friday, even many of Mr Trump’s supporters shook their heads, worried that their candidate’s latest outburst could further hurt him among female voters already sceptical but whose support he’ll badly need to win in November.

The Republican nominee’s pre-dawn Twitter tirade tore into the 1996 Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, a Venezuela-born woman whose weight gain Mr Trump has said created terrible problems for the pageant he owned at the time. Ms Clinton had cited Mr Trump’s treatment of Ms Machado near the end of their first debate, and Mr Trump has spent days revisiting his complaints about Ms Machado.

“Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” read a tweet Trump posted at 5.30am, one in a series of attacks on her.

The “sex tape’’ tweet apparently referred to footage from a Spanish reality show in 2005 in which Ms Machado was a contestant and appeared on camera in bed with a male contestant. The images are grainy and do not include nudity, though Ms Machado later acknowledged in the Hispanic media that she was having sex in the video.

Muddying the waters: an explicit 2000 Playboy video with a cameo by Mr Trump. In a short clip posted on the website BuzzFeed, Mr Trump pours a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo on a New York street, surrounded by a gaggle of women.

“There’s been a lot of talk about sex tapes today and in a strange turn of events only one adult film has emerged today, and its star is Donald Trump,’’ said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s campaign accused the media and Ms Clinton of colluding to set him up for fresh condemnation, to which Ms Clinton retorted, “His latest twitter meltdown is unhinged, even for him.’’

Ms Machado herself took to Facebook to say Trump’s tweets were part of a pattern of “demoralizing women”, calling them “cheap lies with bad intentions”.

And Ms Clinton said they showed anew why someone with Mr Trump’s temperament “should not be anywhere near the nuclear codes”.

With less than 40 days left in the election, Mr Trump’s broadside threw his campaign into a fresh round of second-guessing the candidate’s instincts and confusion about what to do next.

Hillary Clinton has been lampooning Libertarian Gary Johnson and his stumbles in interviews but her jokes mask a deeper anxiety that votes for him could deny her the keys to the White House. However egregious Mr Johnson’s lapses may appear to some Democrats — last week he was unable in an MSNBC interview to name a single foreign leader he admired — he is still drawing roughly 8% support nationally. In some key swing states, he is doing better than that.

On her way to a Chicago fundraiser, Ms Clinton was asked by reporters if she had a favourite world leader and she evinced a moment of confusion, by way of poking fun at Mr Johnson. “Oh, let me think,” she replied sarcastically, before going on to name Angela Merkel of Germany.

She chose to skirt the more serious question about whether the continuing presence of Mr Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, in the presidential contest worried her. She did, however, send a message to Democrats flirting with giving him their vote. “Either Donald Trump or I will be the president of the United States, and so people have to look carefully in making their decision about who to vote for, because it will either be him or me and I am going to do everything I can to make sure it’s me,” she said.

Mr Johnson has twice humiliated himself on national television of late. Earlier last month when he was asked what he would do as president about the tragedy in Aleppo, Syria, he replied, “What is Aleppo?” He later apologised for the display of ignorance, but since has become a punchbag on the latenight talk shows. The history of third-party candidates trying to break the mould of America’s two-party system is not a happy one. The last to make any serious inroads was Ross Perot who achieved 19% of the vote nationally in 1992 when Bill Clinton beat incumbent George HW Bush.

Yet Mr Johnson, whose running mate is William Weld, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, continues to have traction, in part because both of the mainstream candidates this year suffer from historically poor popularity ratings, something he highlighted in an opinion column in The New York Times this week. “Hyper-partisanship may be entertaining, but it’s a terrible way to try to run a country,” he wrote. “We’re the alternative — and we’re the only ticket that offers Americans a chance to find common ground.”

While Mr Johnson would surely take votes away from both Ms Clinton and Mr Trump, there is concern among Democrats that it is their candidate who might suffer the most. He is drawing strong support from millennials, for instance, some of whom supported Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination.

A Bloomberg News/Selzer & Co poll last week found Ms Clinton’s 10-point advantage among younger voters cut to a statistically insignificant four points when Mr Johnson as well as Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who is drawing about 1% nationally, are included in the race.

History also has its warnings. In 2000, it was Ralph Nader’s Green candidacy that ended up siphoning enough votes away from Al Gore to help tip Florida by the slimmest of margins to George W Bush, a hotly contested result that eventually delivered the White House to him.

“If Gore had been president, we probably wouldn’t have had a war in Iraq,” Tim Kaine, Ms Clinton’s running mate told Yahoo News. “Casting a vote, a protest vote, for a third-party candidate that’s going to lose may well affect the outcome.”

President Barack Obama has also been sending out warning signals about the apparent lure of Mr Johnson to some voters who would otherwise back Ms Clinton. “There’s one message I want to deliver to everybody: if you don’t vote, that’s a vote for Trump. If you vote for a third-party candidate who’s got no chance to win, that’s a vote for Trump,” he said in a radio interview.

Not helping are the few major newspapers which, while they have ended decades-long traditions of backing Republicans because of their distaste for Mr Trump, have plumped for Mr Johnson, not Ms Clinton. That was the stance most recently of the Detroit News, the biggest paper in the biggest city in Michigan, a crucial state for the Democrat.

“We recognise the Libertarian candidate is the longest of long shots with an electorate that has been conditioned to believe only Republicans and Democrats can win major offices,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote on Thursday. “But this is an endorsement of conscience, reflecting our confidence that Johnson would be a competent and capable president and an honourable one.”