A pumped-up Donald Trump strutted in front of a crowd of diehard supporters in Pennsylvania on Monday night, throwing aside a spiraling disaster of the groping tape, Republican defections and his plummeting poll ratings.



The Republican presidential nominee made no reference at a rally in the old coalmining town of Wilkes-Barre to the catastrophic 72 hours his campaign had endured since an 11-year old recording was released in which he bragged about using his celebrity status to sexually assault women.

Nor did he refer to the many members of his party who abandoned him publicly over the weekend in protest at his offensive comments, or to the dramatic headway made by his Democratic rival in the polls.

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Instead, he fired up his loyal army of followers by repeating the threat he made directly to Hillary Clinton’s face at the second presidential debate on Sunday night that once ensconced in the White House he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her alleged crimes.

When the baying crowd at Mohegan Sun Arena shouted “Lock her up!”, Trump shot back at them: “Lock her up is right!”

But in his effervescent post-debate mood he merely succeeded in generating further controversy. He praised the group that acted as conduit for one of the biggest leaks of US government secrets in history: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he said.

And he also managed to adopt an erroneous report by a Russian government-sponsored news agency relating to a recent WikiLeaks stash of documents hacked from the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Trump, reading from an account of the document dump, told his supporters at the Wilkes-Barre rally that Clinton’s longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal – “Sleazy Sidney” as he called him – had sent an email to Podesta in which Blumenthal said it was legitimate to question whether Clinton had failed to protect American personnel in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, when she was US secretary of state.

“In other words, [Blumenthal’s] now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,” Trump said, prompting loud reproaches from the crowd.

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In fact, the claim that Clinton had something to answer for over the death of the US ambassador in Benghazi was made by a Newsweek journalist in an article that Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta, as the author of the magazine piece promptly pointed out. The conflation of the Newsweek quotes and Blumenthal appears to have been extracted by Trump from an inaccurate account of the WikiLeaks documents reported by the Russian online news outlet Sputnik.

The botched attack on Clinton and Blumenthal could backfire for Trump given that he has already been accused by his Democratic rival of being overly complimentary about the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Last Friday the Obama administration claimed that the WikiLeaks documents had been hacked from Democrats’ email accounts by the Russian government in an attempt to sway the US presidential election.

Though Trump avoided talking about the groping tape in Wilkes-Barre, at an earlier rally in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, he did renew his line of defence that his 2005 bragging about being able to kiss and grab the genitals of women was only “locker room talk”. One of his leading surrogates, the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, went further by turning the issue into a joke.

During a warm-up speech at the Wilkes-Barre rally, Giuliani made a quip about it during an attack on Clinton. He said: “Boy, she is as phony as … I better not say, as I have to be nice. I might say it back in the locker room.”

In his Wilkes-Barre speech, Trump pressed all the familiar buttons that have by now become a mainstay of his insurrectionary campaign. He promised to build a wall along the southern border and have the Mexicans pay for it, to bring jobs back to America from overseas, and to cut taxes and government regulation.

The candidate’s braggadocio was clearly tailored to suit the tastes of his hardcore supporters, most of whom dismissed concern about the NBC tape as so much political correctness. The Republican candidate also appeared to believe that his openly hostile stance towards Clinton in the presidential debate – in which he threatened her with jail, interrupted her and jabbed his fingers at her multiple times, and stood ominously behind her when she was talking – had put the calamity of the groping scandal behind him.

So ebullient did he appear on stage on Monday night that he even took a toddler from his parents’ arms and carried him on to the stage. The crowd erupted in riotous cheering when the billionaire asked the child: “Do you want to go back to [your parents] or stay with Donald Trump?” The toddler replied: “Trump.”

But no matter how much he succeeded in firing up his base of dedicated Trumpistas, the reality TV star could not erase the fact that outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Mohegan Sun Arena, his campaign remains in considerable trouble. As a signal of the profound unease that his candidacy has generated among senior Republicans, the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, effectively dumped Trump, telling congressional colleagues that he would neither defend his party’s nominee nor campaign with him.

One of the first opinion polls to have been conducted since the groping bombshell gave Clinton an 11-point lead nationally over her rival. The NBC News / Wall Street Journal survey put Clinton on 46% to Trump’s 35%.

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There was also evidence that Clinton is solidifying her lead in key swing states such as Ohio, which has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential race since 1964. Clinton travelled to Ohio on Monday to press home that advantage, and later this week President Obama will wade in on her behalf in Cleveland and the state capital, Columbus.

It came as John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for US president, was forced to publicly account for the decision to abandon Trump.

“Why now?” the Arizona senator was asked during a debate with his Democratic challenger, with the moderator noting the litany of incendiary remarks Trump has made against Mexicans, Muslims, prisoners of war, a disabled journalist, a Gold Star military family and a Hispanic judge, alongside a decades-long record of offensive comments about women.

Earlier in his campaign, Trump also taunted McCain for having been a prisoner of war, telling an audience he preferred “people that weren’t captured”.

“If someone wants to say something disparaging of me, I understand that,” McCain said during Arizona’s Senate debate. “I spoke out strongly on several other issues where I thought Mr Trump was absolutely wrong. I’ve not been shy about it.

“When Mr Trump attacks women and demeans the women in our nation and our society, that is a point where I just have to part company. It’s not pleasant for me to renounce the nominee of my party.”

Over the weekend, McCain released a statement declaring it “impossible to continue to offer even conditional support” to Trump and said he and his wife, Cindy McCain, will instead write in the name of “some good conservative Republican who is qualified to be president”. On Monday night, McCain said this was likely to be the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who dropped out of the presidential race in December last year: “He’s an old, good friend of mine and a lot of people like him.”