WASHINGTON: In the parallel universe Donald Trump and his aides and supporters live in, he is miles ahead and winning the US presidential election comfortably. Hillary Clinton is weak, washed up, and vanquished — and is on drugs to keep her going.
In another step down the slippery staircase of suspicion and screwiness, the Republican candidate suggested on Saturday Clinton and he both take a drug test, because in his view that is what helped her through the second debate, which he claims he won.
“We should take a drug test prior (to the third and final debate) because…I don’t know what’s going on with her. At the beginning of her last debate — she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like, ‘Oh, take me down.’ She could barely reach her car,” Trump claimed at a campaign rally in New Hampshire.
Trump has repeatedly invoked Clinton’s health issues on the campaign trail, but even accounting for his off-the-cuff and hyperbolic rhetoric, which he often walks back or later denies, the drug charges raised eyebrows.
Many pundits saw it as a tactic to prepare the ground for his losing the election (as polls indicate he will), along with allegations that they have been rigged by some global conspiracy against working class Americans — of which Clinton is a part.
The Republican candidate has begun to sound increasingly shrill and unhinged as his campaign comes apart in the face of serial charges from women who claim he groped them, and the GOP divided over supporting him.
On her part, Hillary Clinton is scaling down public appearances, in part to prepare for the third debate (which Trump does not seem to need to), but also to avoid answering questions about her own embarrassing missteps and infractions while in office. The Clinton camp is also betting on Trump self-destructing with his constant self-aggrandising, even if it means giving up the news cycle to his antics. But in Trump’s view, she is running away from battle and trying to recover from her health issue, possibly with the help of drugs.
In his remarks in New Jersey to a large group of Indian-Americans, who trend towards Democrats by more than 80%, Trump mocked Clinton for being out of sight, suggesting she was recuperating and preparing for the final debate and while his manliness flew around the country campaigning. “Did you see the (second) debate? It was so easy” he boasted, claiming he won comfortably and Clinton was now hiding her ill-health and conserving her energy for the third.
The idea that he is completely out of depth talking policy details and cannot go beyond mouthing generic slogans laced with superlatives does not even appear to cross his mind – or that of his supporters. “It’s you media folks who make a big deal of the details. He has many smart people working for him…he did not become a successful billionaire by accident,” rails a Trump supporter wearing a Make America Great Again cap and a Hillary for Prison 2016 T-shirt.
He does not have the $29 ticket to go in but is happy hanging out in front of giant-sized posters of Hillary Clinton and Sonia Gandhi in horns out to “Get Modi” for the Gujarat riots as “Hillary’s NGOs” rummage through skeletons of cattle with a magnifying glass.
He has no idea what it all means. Just another crazy addition to an increasingly bizarre electoral college.