Campaign 2016:
Ina Twitter tirade, Donald Trump shames a former pageant winner.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Donald Trump shamed a former beauty pageant winner Friday for her sexual history and encouraged presidential voters to check out what he called her “sex tape” in an early morning tweet-storm that dragged him further away from his campaign’s efforts to broaden his appeal to women.
A day after he injected former President Bill Clinton’s infidelities into the campaign, Trump accused Hillary Clinton’s campaign of helping 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado get U.S. citizenship, but offered no proof. He said Machado had a “terrible” past that a “duped” Clinton had overlooked before holding her up “as an angel” in the first presidential debate.
“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 missive from Trump posted on his verified Twitter account at 5:30 a.m.
“This is ... unhinged. Even for Trump,” Clinton retorted in a tweet of her own. And Machado took to her Facebook page to say Trump’s tweets were part of a pattern of “demoralizing women.”
“These attacks are cheap lies with bad intentions,” Machado said.
Trump appeared undaunted, even as his broadside against Machado ricocheted across the campaign, and Democrats seized it to criticize him all the more. His campaign described the hullabaloo as evidence of collusion between biased news outlets and Clinton’s campaign, calling it “the single biggest coordinated media attack in history.”
And almost 12 hours after he shook up Twitter predawn, Trump returned with a new tweet invoking Clinton’s famous ad from her 2008 campaign portraying her as the best candidate to pick up an urgent call at the White House at 3 a.m.
“For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o’clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!” Trump wrote.
Machado, the Venezuela born actress, has been center stage in the campaign since Clinton noted in Monday’s debate that Trump had mocked her publicly for gaining weight after she won Miss Universe, a pageant then owned by the businessman. If that was a trap laid by Clinton, the irrepressible Trump dug himself deeper the next day by saying Machado’s “massive” weight gain had been “a real problem.”
His latest taunt appeared to refer to footage from a Spanish reality show in 2005 in which Machado was a contestant and appeared on camera in bed with a male contestant. The images are grainy and do not include nudity, though Machado later acknowledged in the Hispanic media that she was having sex in the video.
Clinton’s campaign has released videos featuring Machado and has arranged for reporters to interview her in an effort to use Trump’s comments against him just as early voting get under way in critical states.