Graceless Trump gets uglier with women

WASHINGTON: Just how much uglier the US presidential election can get is hard to fathom, but

Republican

candidate Donald Trump took it down several notches with yet another series of graceless comments that could lose him whatever little support he had among

women

.

He repeatedly suggested that women who have accused him of sexual assault were not attractive enough for him to go after them, calling them “horrible”, and their allegations “lies” and “fabrications.”

While contesting their accounts is perfectly understandable, it was Trump’s descent into scorning their looks, accompanied by a jeering imitation of the purported sexual pass, that grated around the airwaves on Friday as the Republican nominee’s prospects for the White House nosedived.

“Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you,” Trump sneered at a campaign rally about one of his accusers. “When you looked at that horrible woman last night, you said ‘I don’t think so,’ whoever she is, wherever she comes from, the stories are total fiction. They are 100 percent made up.”

The astonishing putdown of what Trump considers plain women was compounded by disclosures that his son

Donald Trump Jr

once told a radio show that women who cannot handle sexual harassment should stay out of the workforce. “Like, you should go maybe teach kindergarten. I think it’s a respectable position,” Trump Jr was quoted saying in a 2013 interview, plunging his father’s already doddering campaign further in doldrums.

The ceaseless

sexism

and macho bravado was being shredded across the country even as Trump proclaimed in meetings that it was all a conspiracy by the global elites to prevent him from saving the American working class. Polls show him falling steadily behind Hillary Clinton, unable to take advantage of the Democratic candidate’s vulnerability arising from her own political career strewn with scandals and missteps.

The American tabloid press is swimming in sewage featuring stories ranging from claims by Gennifer Flowers, a former Bill Clinton lover, that he paid her $200 to have an abortion during their affair to Trump’s boast that “deeply troubled women are always the best in bed.”

In the mainstream media, there is only despair, expressed in the direst warnings and language. “Trump may be worse than just a pig,” reads a headline for a Washington Post oped. From the New York Times: How Dictatorships Are Born.

Amid all this, it was left to First Lady Michelle Obama to elevate the campaign with a stirring speech that was not as much in support of Hillary Clinton as a heroic expression of feminine torment. In an emotional address on Thursday, she tore into Trump and his grotesque sexism, for “the shameful comments about our bodies,” for “the disrespect of our ambitions and our intellect,” and America’s regression into “the belief that you can do anything you want to a woman.”

Shared more than six million times across social media, the stirring speech put Trump further at odds with female voters, with whom he is already 15 to 30% behind. At this rate, he is poised to hand Hillary Clinton a landslide even if every white, bluecollar male voted for him.