SEPTEMBER 28, 2016
Photo: Getty
What has proven by far to be the weirdest Presidential election in my lifetime has just gotten even weirder.
Even with all the stumbles and controversies generated by Donald Trump at Monday night’s debate, the one that seems to have had the most resonance and is still making headlines 48 hours later is Hillary Clinton’s accusation that Donald Trump “fat shamed” Alicia Machado, the 1996 Miss Universe, by calling her “Miss Piggy” because of her weight gain, and “Miss Housekeeping” because she is a Latina.
Trump appeared blindsided by the accusation (though never denying it), interrupting Clinton three separate times to ask “Where did you find this?,” but Clinton talked right over him and told Trump that Machado, who is from Venezuela, has now become an American citizen and will definitely be voting for President in November.
This move by Clinton was no accident, since a mere hour after the debate, her campaign rolled our a new commercial in which Machado has been given the opportunity to tell her own story.
If Trump had just left this story alone, it would have been bad but would probably have only been a one-day controversy. But Trump being Trump, he just had to take the bait, and predictably he called into the comfy confines of Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” to deliver a blistering attack not on Clinton, who leveled the charge, but Machado, a private citizen.
Unprompted by the “Fox & Friends” hosts, Trump ranted that Machado was “the absolute worst” Miss Universe ever and claimed that after she won the title,
“She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. Not only that…her attitude…we had a real problem with her.”
In one fell swoop, Trump managed to do even further potential damage with female and Latino voters (with whom his campaign desperately needs to make inroads), and his faceplant was compounded by the first round of scientifically-taken polls that indicate the voters believe that Clinton was the clear debate winner by margins of up to 40% more than Trump. (He much preferred to cite the results of on-line polls, where Trump supporters can vote, refresh, and continue to vote hundreds of times.)
Trump finally shut up about Machado by Wednesday, but the controversy was given new life when she made the rounds of the morning talk shows, painting a sympathetic story of being repeatedly humiliated by Trump, who owned the Miss Universe pageant and was technically her boss. Calling her “Miss Eating Machine,” he forced her to regularly get to the gym and even blindsided her one day when he invited reporters to come watch her work out, berating her on camera for her weight gain. (The film footage of this is tough to watch.) Machado said that as a result of the humiliation by Trump, she developed anorexia and bulimia.
Trump loyalists began a predictable smear campaign on Wednesday, with Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Machado, who has become a star of telenovelas, was actually a porn star. (Posing twice for Playboy hardly makes someone a porn star, Rushbo.) Others raised a 1998 accusation that she was an accomplice in an attempted murder (thrown out by lack of evidence), and a judge once claimed that she had threatened to kill him. It looks like the old “discredit-the-victim” game is back with full force.
But the damage has been done. Trump was back on Teleprompter on Wednesday, but that helps only if he sticks to the script. My guess is that his advisers will try to convince Trump to seriously practice for the next debate. What do you think the chances are of that happening?
