Race for White House hots up
NEW YORK. — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton yesterday headed back to the campaign trail after a fiery presidential debate, with the Republican looking to bounce back after a weekend that crippled his White House bid.
With just over four weeks to go before American voters head to the ballot boxes to choose their next commander-in-chief, the candidates travelled to swing states — Trump to Pennsylvania and Clinton to Michigan and Ohio — to court voters.
On Sunday, before tens of millions of television viewers and a live audience including Bill Clinton and three women who have accused him of abuse, Trump threatened to jail his Democratic rival and lobbed incendiary allegations against her former president husband.
The 70-year-old real estate mogul, seeking to stem the bleeding in his campaign after scores of Republicans deserted him, apologised on Sunday for “locker room talk” in which he bragged about groping women. But he stated baldly that “Bill Clinton was abusive to women”.
“If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse,” Trump insisted. “Mine are words, his was action,” he said.
Shattering the last vestiges of political decorum, Trump threatened the former secretary of state — whom he accused of having “hate in her heart” — with imprisonment if he wins the presidency.
“If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney-general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception,” Trump said.
The 68-year-old former first lady and US senator, who is vying to be America’s first female president, pushed back by saying Trump’s lewd comments merely showed his true self.
“This is who Donald Trump is and the question for us, the question our country must answer is that this is not who we are,” she said.
When Clinton said that it was “awfully good” that someone with Trump’s temperament was “not in charge of the law of our country,” he shot back: “Because you’d be in jail.”
Two separate polls showed Clinton had prevailed in the second of three presidential debates. A CNN/ORC survey of debate watchers put her up 57-34 percent, while a YouGov snap poll put her margin of victory closer at 47-42 percent.
“I think last night he showed his heart to the American people. He said he apologised to his family, apologised to the American people, that he was embarrassed by it,” Trump’s running mate Mike Pence told CNN yesterday.
“And then he moved on to the real choice in this election, which is really not just a choice between two candidates — it’s a choice between two futures,” said Pence, who had said over the weekend he himself was “offended” by Trump’s remarks.
Trump faces a make-or-break moment after his crude boasts, which he made in 2005 and which became public in a video released on Friday, as streams of Republicans have retracted their support for his campaign.
With a campaign based on earning free television air time and little ground game, Trump is dependent on the Republican Party machinery to get out the vote.
The party leadership had been deeply angered by Trump’s misogynistic remarks and Pence said they were indefensible, though he was back on his side by Sunday night. — AFP.