TRUMP TO MAKE ‘CLOSING ARGUMENTS’ OF ELECTION CAMPAIGN
The Democratic candidate has a personal dislike of Vladimir Putin, while the Republican hopeful plays down any threats from Moscow
>> CLEVELAND: Donald Trump will lay out plans this morning, Thai time [last night, US time], for the first 100 days of his presidency, in what his campaign is calling his “closing arguments” in one of the most bitter election campaigns in US history.
The 2016 election cycle pitting the Republican nominee against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has turned increasingly toxic, with Mr Trump fuelling wild conspiracy theories about vote “rigging” and Ms Clinton warning that the provocative billionaire was straying into authoritarianism.
Ms Clinton excoriated Mr Trump as a threat to US democracy on Friday for not pledging to honour results of the upcoming presidential election, as the rivals battled for supremacy in battleground states.
“We know the difference between leadership and dictatorship, and the peaceful transition of power is one of the things that sets us apart,” Ms Clinton told a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the key swing states up for grabs on Nov 8.
Despite isolated allegations of voter fraud, controversy over the tight 2000 vote and rampant gerrymandering, US elections have been regarded as free and fair.
Invigorated by both her commanding poll numbers and Mr Trump’s controversial declarations, the candidate vying to become the Unites States’ first female president was in Ohio aiming to block Mr Trump’s efforts to claim the blue-collar heartland state.
Mr Trump, well aware that no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio, campaigned in the Buckeye State on Thursday.
He was then due to head back to the state late yesterday, with running mate Mike Pence.
On Friday, the Manhattan real estate mogul hosted rallies in the battlegrounds of North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“Eighteen days. You’re going to look back at this election and say this is by far the most important vote you’ve ever cast for anyone at any time,” Mr Trump told a crowd in Fletcher, North Carolina.
He was set last night to make a key speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history, delivered during the Civil War in an effort to help unite the country.
“The Donald Trump campaign is a movement unlike anything we’ve seen in our country’s history,” Mr Trump’s national policy director Stephen Miller said.
“Tomorrow’s speech will set the tone for the closing arguments of this election.
“Mr Trump is the change agent our country needs and he will speak to every American tomorrow about his positive vision to restore our economy, give government back to the people and outline the immediate steps he will take in the first 100 days to make America great again.”
Mr Trump earlier said he would give the campaign everything he had, “right up until the actual vote”.
Ms Clinton is narrowly leading in polling in North Carolina, a state Barack Obama won in 2008 but lost to Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.
Mr Trump is trailing badly in the polls, and his debate threat opened him up to a stinging attack from Mr Obama at a Miami rally.
“When you try to sow the seeds of doubt in people’s minds about the legitimacy of our election, that undermines our democracy,” Mr Obama said on Thursday.
“When you suggest rigging or fraud without a shred of evidence ... that is not a joking matter.”
Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear on Wednesday night that if she defeats Donald Trump next month she will enter the White House with the most contentious relationship with Russia of any president in more than three decades, and with a visceral, personal animus toward Vladimir Putin, its leader.
“We haven’t seen a you-can’t-trust-these-guys tone like this since the days of Ronald Reagan,” said Stephen Sestanovich, who served in former president Bill Clinton’s State Department and is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama. “But even that was more a systemic criticism of the Soviet Union. This is focused on Putin himself.”
In a reversal of political roles, Mrs Clinton, the Democratic candidate, is the one portraying Mr Putin as America’s newest arch enemy, whose underlings hack into her Brooklyn campaign headquarters, bomb Syrian civilians and threaten Ukraine and Nato allies in Europe. For a woman who presented a big red “reset” button to her Russian counterpart in March 2009 (with the word incorrectly translated into Russian), the change in tone was more striking than ever in her debate with Mr Trump.
She, and the Obama White House, insist they were on the right course until Mr Putin decided he had more to gain from reviving Cold War tensions than from a quarter-century effort to integrate with the West. Now, much of the Democratic foreign policy establishment has become as hawkish as Mrs Clinton on the subject of Russia, a view that seems almost certain to outlast the campaign.
Privately, some of her longtime advisers are already thinking about what mix of sanctions, diplomatic isolation and international condemnation they might put together if they take office to deal with Mr Putin and the fragile economic state he runs, an update of the “containment” strategy that George Kennan formulated for former president Harry Truman in 1947.
Equally surprising is the Republican reversal of tone. Only four years ago, it was the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who was warning of the dangers of a revanchist Russia and President Barack Obama who said “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”, noting that “the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”.
Most of the Republican Party remains firmly distrustful of Russia. But not Mr Trump, its standard bearer.
“If the United States got along with Russia, wouldn’t be so bad,” he said on Wednesday, uttering not a word about Mr Putin’s land grabs. Instead, he urged viewers to “take a look at the ‘Start Up’ they signed”, apparently confusing the lingo of Silicon Valley with New Start, the 2010 arms control treaty. The problem, he said, is that Russia is outbuilding the US nuclear arsenal — it is not, at least so far, because of the treaty’s limits. The debate then devolved into an argument over which candidate was Mr Putin’s puppet.
Time after time, Mr Trump has insisted, as he did during Wednesday’s debate, that the United States has “no idea” who was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs Clinton’s aides.
“Putin has outsmarted her and Obama at every single step of the way,” he argued, from Syria to the development of new missiles.
For days, hacked emails from the Gmail account of John Podesta, Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman, have embarrassed her campaign, and on Thursday emails from an account that Mr Obama had during his 2008 transition surfaced for the first time. No one knows if the hacking campaign is winding down or whether the revelations so far are simply a prelude to something bigger between now and Election Day.
Mr Obama is considering retaliation that, according to several senior officials, could include attacks inside Russia that could expose corruption among the leadership and embarrass Mr Putin. It is not clear whether Mr Obama will choose that route, even after Vice-President Joe Biden issued a threat last weekend that Mr Putin could get some of his own medicine.
But it is clear that if Mrs Clinton wins, she will enter the White House with a very personal grudge against Mr Putin. He, in turn, has long harboured a grudge against her for her statements in 2011 calling into question the validity of a Russian parliamentary election.
It is possible, Mr Sestanovich warned, that the Clinton and the Obama administration are seeing Mr Putin’s direct hand in too many events. He questioned how the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr, would know for certain that the Kremlin leadership was behind the hacking of the DNC and the emails of Mr Podesta and Colin Powell, one of Mr Clinton’s predecessors as secretary of state. The United States has released none of its evidence, so it is unclear if the conclusion was based on an educated guess about Kremlin operations, an “implant” in Russian networks, or a human spy or communications intercept.
But it is clear, Mr Sestanovich said, that Mr Putin is using this moment of leadership transition to press for any advantage, with methods such as using information warfare techniques on US soil, intimidating Ukraine and running major military exercises on the border with Norway.
Not surprisingly, some Democrats on the left find all this a bit unnerving.
“That reckless branding of Trump as a Russian agent, most of it is coming from the Clinton campaign,” Stephen Cohen, a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton, told CNN in an interview. “And they really need to stop.”
In fact, many in the Democratic Party have spent decades invested in bringing Moscow into the Western fold, dating to the days when President Bill Clinton first met with Boris Yeltsin, then the Russian president, and began the process of expanding the Group of 7 industrialised countries to the Group of 8. They also began the long process of bringing Russia into the World Trade Organisation, an effort to wrap the country in Western-created rules. The nuclear arsenals on both sides shrank by more than 80% to 1,550 deployed warheads on each side under New Start, which Mr Obama negotiated in his first year in office.
The treaty remains in effect. But there are arguments over new weapons, and a major programme to dispose of military stockpiles of plutonium was halted by Mr Putin, citing deteriorating relations with the US. And it is Mr Trump who says he can reverse all that, with good negotiations, if he is president.
“I think I could see myself meeting with Putin and meeting with Russia prior to the start of the administration,” he said in an interview with Michael Savage, the talk show host, last week. “I think it would be wonderful.”