Trump under fire for ex-Miss Universe remarks

feud with the family of a Muslim American soldier who died in Afghanistan.

“For the last month, he’d managed to stay on script and read off the teleprompter. We’d almost forgotten what an erratic, wild and mean man he can be. The Machado thing set him off like a keg of dynamite,” said Republican strategist Ana Navarro, who has been very critical of Mr. Trump. “It is a shocking smallness and pettiness on his part. It is the Khans and Judge Curiel all over again. He and his wild pack of surrogates have been viciously attacking this woman for five days now,” she said, referring to the soldier’s family and the judge whose impartiality Mr. Trump questioned because of his Hispanic heritage.

“Forget being president. This guy isn’t fit to take care of a puppy,” Ms. Navarro added.

Ms. Clinton’s campaign responded forcefully, accusing Mr. Trump of misogyny and questioning his temperament.

Speaking to a late afternoon rally in Coral Springs, Florida, she mocked Mr. Trump’s early morning tweet storm and called it a “meltdown.”

“Who gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe?” she asked. “Really, why does he do things like that?”

Ms. Clinton said Mr. Trump’s behavior was “unhinged, even for him” and was further evidence that he is “temperamentally unfit to be president of the United States.”

“A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not be anywhere near the nuclear codes,” she said.

Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support his allegation that Ms. Machado had a sex tape, a rumor that had widely circulated on the Internet. The GOP nominee appears to have been referring to racy but not explicit footage from a Spanish-language reality television show called “La Granja,” on which she appeared in 2005.

In an attempt to discredit Ms. Machado, Mr. Trump’s allies have also pointed to news reports of an incident in 1998 in Venezuela, in which Ms. Machado was suspected of having driven a getaway car for her then-boyfriend after he shot someone. She allegedly later threatened the judge in the case.

No charges were filed against her, and earlier this week, she called those reports “speculation.”

Mr. Trump has also alleged that Ms. Clinton helped Ms. Machado become a U.S. citizen to attack him. There is no evidence supporting that claim, either.