2016 could be a winnable election for the GOP, especially given Clinton’s continued email woes – yet all year Trump has lurched from one self-inflicted crisis to another

What do Rosie O’Donnell, Serge Kovaleski, Megyn Kelly, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Gonzalo Curiel, Khizr Khan and Alicia Machado have in common?



Hillary Clinton sets sights on Congress as Donald Trump attacks his accusers Read more

All have been on the receiving end of Donald Trump’s insults as the businessman spent more than a year pursuing futile feuds that may go a long way toward costing him the White House.

A chorus of hands slapping against Republican foreheads was almost audible each time the nominee threw off any pretence of self-discipline and lashed out, distracting onlookers from his efforts to present himself as moderate or exploit Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses. This week they are doubtless praying that he doesn’t squander the golden opportunity presented by the FBI’s investigation into a new batch of emails that may be related to Clinton’s private server.

“Trump is on the verge of blowing it,” Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary, tweeted on 30 September. “Free advice: Focus on Hillary. No one else. Hillary is your opponent. No one else is.”

For William Cohen, a former defence secretary and Republican senator for Maine, the breaking point came in July last year. Soon after launching his presidential campaign, Trump said of the Arizona senator and former Vietnam prisoner of war John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

It later emerged that Trump had been granted four education draft deferments and one medical. The latter was due to bone spurs in his heels.

Cohen, who was McCain’s best man, recalled: “I was outraged about it. To this day John McCain can’t lift his arm to shoulder level. To say that about what he went through being tortured, his sense of patriotism, from a man who avoided the draft with a bone spur? No, I don’t think so. It turned me immediately.”

Then there was the Republican primary in which Trump dismissed rivals as “low energy” Jeb Bush, “Little” Marco Rubio and “Lyin’” Ted Cruz.

“He’s gone out of his way to demean, degrade, denigrate and delegitimise,” Cohen said, “all the Ds you can think of. I think that gives you real insight into the man’s character.”

Cohen, 76, now heads a business advisory firm. He added: “It’s unheard of in my lifetime to see anyone engaged in this vulgarity and crudity of language and attitude. What we’ve seen is something pretty horrific in our political system that I’ve never seen before and I hope I’ll never see again.”

The McCain incident also weighed heavily on Republican strategist Rick Wilson, despite his own past clashes with the 2008 presidential nominee. “But the most outrageous and revealing thing,” he said, “was the attack on the Khan family and the continued attacks from his supporters.”

Khizr Khan, whose son, an American Muslim, was killed in Iraq, denounced Trump at the Democratic national convention in July, while brandishing a copy of the US constitution. Trump criticised the Gold Star family while claiming that he too had made sacrifices as a businessman, triggering a wave of revulsion.

Wilson continued: “The list of people he’s insulted is long and distinguished. There are no boundaries on this guy about who he’s going to offend. He’s angry at everybody and acts in a way that reflects his poor impulse control. He’s basically inhumane.

“Politics is a tough game and we have elbows out but there are certain lanes we try not to play out of. I’m one of the toughest but I leave children out of it. I’m astonished at what he’s gotten away with.”

According to a running total compiled by the New York Times, Trump has insulted 279 people, places and things on Twitter alone. Republicans were ultimately forced to conclude that Trump would be Trump, a 70-year-old man who cannot change and has no intention of doing so. They will never know if staying “on message” might have left him running far closer in the polls.

‘The straw that broke the camel’s back’

Rich Galen, once press secretary to vice-president Dan Quayle, said his patience ran out in July when the nominee claimed that Gonzalo Curiel, a judge who was born in Indiana, was biased against him in a civil case over Trump University because his parents were from Mexico.

“That was antithetical to everything I’ve worked for in public life,” Galen said.

“It looks like the actual turning point was the Miss Universe woman, which not only offended women but they told their husbands they should be offended too. It’s one thing to diss John McCain but he’s a big boy and can look after himself. When he went after a woman over an image problem, that would unite 90% of women and men and was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Machado won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996. Clinton brought up the largely forgotten case at the end of the first presidential debate, saying Trump had called her “Miss Piggy” and, because she is Latina, “Miss Housekeeping”. To the dismay of his party, Trump took the bait and talked about Machado for days, telling Fox News: “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.”

“He sees the entire universe in terms of how it affects him,” Galen said. “He simply doesn’t have the temperament to be president of the United States. He figured out what the country had been mad about; he was the wrong messenger for the right message.”

Trump accused Mexican immigrants of being “rapists”, drug traffickers and criminals at his campaign launch in June 2015. He said Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever”. He mocked Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has a congenital joint condition.

When a videotape came to light in which Trump boasted about groping women, and then several women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault, he did what he always does: he picked a fight with his accusers and the media that reported their claims.

Trump’s outlandish statements have stunned Republican party grandees. William Brock, 85, a former chair of the Republican National Committee who served under Ronald Reagan as US trade representative and secretary of labor, criticised him for attacking both politicians, who are fair game, and civilians, who are not.

“There has not been a distance drawn between individuals not involved in politics – Rosie O’Donnell, the Khan family – and the Obamas, the McCains, the Clintons, which are a part of his core message and tend to reinforce what his supporters want,” Brock said. “There has been an unwillingness or inability to choose the targets that really would validate his message rather than just what pops up at that moment.”

Brock is no fan of Clinton and feels she has made insults of her own. “The thing that’s troubling about the Trump support base,” he said, “is it’s almost they don’t exist to much of Washington. When Clinton said they’re deplorable, that’s a judgment that’s unethical and wrong.”

Given Clinton’s high unpopularity rating, and the current flare up around the FBI’s probe into whether she mishandled classified information as secretary of state, a conventional Republican in a conventional year might have fared well against her. Republican consultant James Harris believes that if he had managed to avoid all his gaffes, Trump would be leading in the polls. It is a case of what might have been.

“But for Trump’s comments and self-inflicted wounds and random tangents,” he said, “he would be tied or up a point or two in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada.

“If you look at wage stagnation in those states, they want change, but he is not articulating a vision of change. Voters are worried about the future direction of the country but we’re talking about Miss Universe. Who gives a rat’s ass about that?”