Question of temperament: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Credit:AP "This will cost him support among suburban white, college-educated women who are likely to play a key role in determining the outcome of the campaign. It goers much further – every man in America has a wife, a girlfriend, a daughter, a sister, a mother, or even just a co-worker or a friend who has gone through self-image issues, or has struggled with their weight at some point in their lives." The extent to which Clinton is ahead – just – in national polls is attributed in great part to her standing with white, college-educated women. Back in 2012, Republican Mitt Romney won this demographic, defeating Barack Obama 52-46, according to exit polls. This year, the GOP candidate trails miserably – Trump is at a low 32 and Clinton is on 52, according to a September poll by The Washington Post. But among white women who have not been to college, Trump leads 52-40. And among women overall, Clinton and Trump are in a virtual tie, 46-44. So there's nothing sentimental in the assessment of an unnamed Clinton staffer quoted by the Post: "We know that white suburban women are critical for both parties…and the lowest hanging fruit for expansion among that group is more likely to be college-educated white women."

Hence a huge Clinton effort to ensure that last week will be remembered as Trump's Machado meltdown, an apoplectic and self-destructive display of his sexism and misogyny, all flushed into the open by Clinton pinging him for dubbing Machado "Miss Piggy, "because she had put on weight during her 1990s stint as Miss Universe; and "Miss Housekeeping", because she was Latina. It was celebrated instantly as one of the great acts of "political idiocy", particularly Trump's instinctive bid, as the debate closed, to put distance between himself and the Machado business by resurrecting the business of Rosie O'Donnell, the comedian he had condemned in the past as "a slob", "disgusting", "a fat pig" with "a fat, ugly face" – who he declared afresh deserved all she had got. The men in Team Trump, none of them paragons of virtue in the marriage stakes, piled on as Trump hurtled towards a cliff edge in a weeklong tirade against Machado – a spectacle Clinton described as "unhinged" and others deemed as worse than might have been acceptable in the Mad Men era. Only one of the women, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, showed something approximating restraint. She told ABC's The View that she had personally reprimanded Trump for his language on women. Any policy message that Trump wanted to amplify was lost.

In the early hours of Friday, he set the agenda for the daily news cycle with a Twitter tirade against Machado and on Saturday evening he was slashing his wrists, politically, repeatedly interrupting himself with wacky asides and tangential taunts, as he tried to deliver what his campaign had billed as a debate-shifting, nine-paragraph message targeted at millennial voters – just as an editor at The New York Times was executing the keystrokes to upload a bombshell report on leaked tax papers that reveal Trump probably avoided paying any federal income tax for as long as 18 years. When Trump loses, his instinctive response is to lash out, much like a cornered animal. Having created a mess, he then cast himself as victim – "look what I get out of it – I get nothing", he said while being swallowed by the Machado madness. Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado is pushing back against the sexism of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Credit:AP There's a pattern in the crazed manner in which Trump explodes into his schoolboy tantrums – the most excessive have come after clear instances of poor performance by him or by his campaign. Take his mind-boggling, week-long attack on the Khan family, whose son died heroically as a US Marine in Afghanistan – that was after the Republican Convention, of which he was circus master, was judged a failure by comparison with the Democratic convention.

Take his week-long tirade against the beauty queen Machado – that was after Clinton cleaned up in the first of three campaign debates between the presidential candidates. There is a perpetual insecurity in Trump, the manifestation of which can't be explained away as locker-room blokiness. To the extent that he thinks beforehand, he genuinely believes it's appropriate to enliven campaign discourse with references to his penis size, a journalist's menstrual cycle and a beauty queen's eating habits. In offering himself for the highest office in the land, he believes it's appropriate to mimic a handicapped reporter and an opponent who got the wobbles while suffering a bout of pneumonia – both on national TV. In The Washington Post, columnist Chris Cillizza observed: "The Trump in that [Clinton/pneumonia] video is the exact opposite of presidential. The word that kept coming to my mind when I watched it was 'nasty.' He seems mean, angry, vindictive. None of those words tend to be what people use to describe presidents." Trump's unravelling has an unnerving side. Clearly each bout happens before our eyes, but its impact on opinion polls is moot.

In the week since the first debate on September 26, Trump has conducted himself like a party balloon fast losing gas. Yet support has edged up for both candidates, presumably as more undecided voters get off the fence – and in Trump's case, the NeverTrump brigade comes home to daddy. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump now hovers at 45 per cent – 2.5 points behind Clinton. But since the last northern summer, while support for Trump has yo-yoed up and down, the mid-40s has proved to be a ceiling through which he can't break. By contrast, the graph of support for Clinton peaks either side of the 50 per cent mark. All of which explains the Clinton campaign's efforts to capitalise on the past week, which has been a graphic revelation of Trump's Neanderthal perception of women – his obsession with how they look and how they should conduct themselves; his preoccupation with bedding them, that is all about his satisfaction; and notwithstanding all that – clang, clang, clang – his belief that they will vote for him in sufficient numbers to make him president. Inevitably this debate is peppered with coarse language – or with terms that possibly are acceptable in social science, but have yet to be used widely in the mainstream media. But Slate columnist, and author of The Goddess Pose, Michelle Goldberg wrote recently: "[Trump's] belief that Bill Clinton's affairs reflect badly on Hillary demonstrates something key to his psyche – for Trump, the only salient distinction when judging a woman's worth is whether she's f---able or unf---able." Quite apart from the Machado run-in, the latest insight into Trump's objectification of women is a long offering from Associated Press, which is based on extensive interviews with cast and crew from Trump's hugely successful TV show, The Apprentice. It's a sordid account of a testosterone-infused environment in which Trump demeaned women with his sexist language; and rated them as potential sex partners – by breast size and other physical attributes.

Trump, second from left, with his son, Donald Trump jnr, far left, in a recent season of Credit:Screenshot In keeping with Trump's icky innuendo about his daughters, his repeated lewd comments about a camerawoman often were accompanied by a reference to how her beauty reminded him of his daughter Ivanka. Trump demanded that women wear shorter dresses and show more cleavage, and speculated about which of them would be "a tiger in bed". He would ask women their breast size and if their breasts were real. In the first year of his marriage to his third and current wife, Trump canvassed women on the set as potential sex partners. Contestant Randal Pinkett told AP: "He was like, 'Isn't she hot; check her out' kind of gawking; something to the effect of 'I'd like to hit that.'" Another participant recounted how Trump interrupted a program discussion. "He just stopped [mid-conversation] and pointed to [a woman in earshot], and said, 'You'd f--- her, wouldn't you? I'd f--- her. C'mon, wouldn't you?'"

Trump and his surrogates thought it was fine to argue, as Newt Gingrich did, that "you're not supposed to gain 60 pounds (27 kilograms) during the year you're Miss Universe". But it's not just Miss Universe – the Los Angeles Times has turned up court papers revealing Trump's demand that women who were not slim, or who didn't pass his "pretty" test, should be fired from one of his golf clubs in California. The club's director of catering was ordered to sack a "highly competent and professional" woman because "Mr Trump does not like fat people" and Trump had "told manager many times … that the restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women". Instead of firing them, the club management took to hiding the women whenever Trump visited the club. In his habitual grading of women on the Trump scale of objectification, the GOP candidate declared one of the Kardashian women to have a "bad body", and at a time when she was pregnant, he demanded that she not dress "like [she] weighs 120lb". He advised 81-year-old Kim Novak to "sue her plastic surgeon". He said of fellow Republican primary nominee, Carly Fiorina, "Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?" It's hardly surprising then that Republican strategist Ana Navarro would tweet during the row over Trump's mistreatment of Machado: "I've struggled w/weight issues all my life. And I agree. A man who shames and bullies a woman for her weight isn't even fit to be a man."

Trump doesn't only obsess about women's weight. With men, he's more jocular than cutting, but when it comes to his own weight, it seems that Trump is quite calculating. Much of the public record gives his height as 6'2" (188 centimetres), but in his latest doctor's letter that vouches for his "excellent physical health", Trump's height is stated as 6'3." For the self-conscious, that extra inch in height is very important. Given that his doctor records his body weight at 236lb and height of 6'3", Trump is merely "overweight", but without that extra inch, the candidate who feasts on McDonalds and KFC, would be obese, according to various body mass index [BMI] charts. In The Washington Post, columnist Eugene Robinson made the obvious retort to the Trump tut-tutting about Machado's weight gain: "For Trump and Gingrich, both of whom have ample spare tires where their waists should be, to criticise anyone about his or her weight is ridiculous – better to point fingers at each other rather than Machado." The various tactics in Trump's post-debate eruptions were described as efforts to "fat-shame" and "slut-shame" the former Miss Universe. He demeaned her as "disgusting" and the "worst Miss U".

Trump's claim that Machado's eating habits made her the "worst Miss U" is especially revealing given all the other charges his campaign has tried to pin on her. They would have the world believe that she's an accessory to murder, that she had threatened the life of a judge and that the father of her child is a Mexican drug lord – all of which she denies and none of which led to charges. Trump also tweeted that his millions of followers should seek out a Machado sex tape, which seemingly doesn't exist. There is some grainy footage, described as "risqué", of her in bed on a TV show, but unlike the wife of you-know-who, who has appeared naked on magazine covers, Machado was under the covers. In the past, Trump has been quite blasé about so-called sex tapes. He apparently watched one that featured Paris Hilton with his wife; and he happily suggested that a former Miss USA contestant release her tape. It was in searching for the purported sex tape that he attributed to Alicia Machado, that BuzzFeed came across the Playboy video that features Trump's cameo role. By Trump's world view, Machado's "worst" offence was her eating habits.

Trump claims Machado stacked on more than 50lb. Interviewed on CNN, Machado insisted she gained just 16lb, and there's some support for her in an interview Trump gave to CBS at the time when, far from being the "worst Miss U", Trump said: "She's turned out to be one of the great Miss Universes ... [even though] she had a little problem … where she gained a little weight." All this is coming from the man who told a TV audience: "If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps, I'd be dating her." He told a radio show how he'd been stunned by the beauty of a 12-year-old Paris Hilton, saying when she walked into a room: "Who the hell is that?" He's the same guy who told Esquire magazine: "You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass." Trump even cast his newborn daughter Tiffany in erotic terms, telling Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1994 that the child had inherited her model mother's long legs. Cupping his hands against his chest to hold imaginary breasts, he added: "We don't know whether or not she's got this part yet, but time will tell." And his inverted priorities were on display in 2005, when he spoke of his current wife Melania, telling radio host Howard Stern: "She's a great beauty, but she's a great beauty inside – which is almost as important."

Slate's Goldberg concluded: "If [Trump's] ultimately beaten by a woman, it will be in part due to his inability to see past the f---able/unf---able binary and [to] recognise women as fully human – it's hard to imagine justice quite so poetic." There's a disturbing and continuous focus by the Trump campaign on the fact that Clinton, more than a politician or a candidate, is a w-o-m-a-n and that, of itself, makes her unelectable. As the campaign flailed in the weekend, responding to The New York Times' sensational story on Trump's non-payment of tax, lead surrogate and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani found Clinton guilty on the grounds of her gender, posing this question on ABC News: "Don't you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she's ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?" Likewise, much of Trump's assaults on Clinton consist of adjectives – "crooked", "incompetent"and the like, that are followed by a single incriminating noun: "woman". To the extent that it's possible, Trump attempted subtlety to generate debate on Bill Clinton's affairs and Hillary Clinton's response to them – resorting to apophasis, the rhetorical art of injecting an issue into a discourse by claiming you'll not talk about it.

Of course, being Trump he couldn't help himself and the media did its part too – publishing long, historical reviews of the Clinton sex scandals. Within days of the debate in which he said he would not say something "extremely rough to Hillary, to her family", Trump was saying rough things. Importantly, that this was a considered campaign strategy is proved by the talking points it circulated to surrogates – to counter Trump's Machado mess, the talking heads were told to change the topic to Monica Lewinsky, and to include this line: "Mr Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they actively worked to destroy Bill Clinton's accusers." All the Clinton scandals, and Hillary Clinton's role in them, have been canvassed often and always have been such a dismal failure for Republicans that GOP strategists refer to the issue as "the nuclear option". Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Credit:AP For good reason – in the course of the Lewinsky affair, starting early in 1998, Hillary Clinton's approval rating rocketed from 42 points to 64 points by the end of that year.

"It's like a nuclear hand-grenade," Republican pollster David Winston told the Los Angeles Times. "As Trump blows everything up, does he blow himself up as well – or does he only get damaged around the edges." A CNN/Gallup poll at the time asked if Americans admired how Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in the course of the Lewinsky saga – 72 per cent said yes. In a Fox News poll, more than 60 per cent thought she was a strong woman for sticking with her husband. And while the wife currently has a "favourability" challenge with the American electorate, the husband doesn't – Bill Clinton's favourability rating was 53 per cent in August. In the 2015 lead-up to the GOP primaries, Republican strategists dipped their toes in the Clinton waters again, testing the response of swing voters. "These voters were completely turned off and disgusted by it," strategist Tim Miller told The Washington Post. "We found time and again [that] these attacks turned Hillary into a victim and that it engendered sympathy for her." That's not how Trump sees it. In September, he told The New York Times that he was raising Bill Clinton's infidelity for two reasons: one, it would unsettle Hillary Clinton; and two, it will repulse female voters. In the course of the primaries, he argued to reporters that while others had failed, he would finesse winning attacks on the Clinton scandals. There's a widely held view that Trump is falling into his own trap here. One of the complaints about Hillary Clinton is that she needs to be more human and likeable on the campaign trail – and if he keeps up, Trump might do the job for her.

Charles Blow, a columnist in The New York Times, makes this argument: "In his anger and haste, [Trump] is severely underestimating the empathy people have for a betrayed spouse, who might, in misdirected anger, blame the victim, believe the unbelievable, and grant unearned forgiveness…a broken heart isn't a physical wound but a psychic, spiritual one. "It hurts like hell and people often respond in ways that are less than honourable, but ultimately understandable." Some accounts of Hillary Clinton's aggressive countering of women's claims that they had had an affair with Bill Clinton, which later proved to be true, define her role as that of a motivating political force; others cast her as a wounded wife who believed her husband's denials, despite his form. This was when Hillary Clinton coined the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" to describe a well-funded and conservatively driven, but ultimately a failed campaign for Bill Clinton's impeachment. It's also when her response to one such woman's claim, reportedly was: "We have to destroy her story." It's no accident that several of the key figures in the Trump campaign are GOP veterans who were instrumental in the "vast right-wing conspiracy".

Given Trump's demeaning treatment of women over the years, his record as a philanderer and reported allegation of rape within marriage by his first wife, Ivana, any criticism on his part of Bill Clinton and/or of Hillary Clinton's response to the Bill Clinton affairs is very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black. At the time of the Lewinsky saga, Trump's only criticism of Bill Clinton was, typically, that people would have been more forgiving if Clinton's affair had been with "a really beautiful woman of sophistication". He wrote-off Paula Jones as "a loser", and he charged that Bill Clinton was being hounded by "a truly unattractive cast of characters". Note, it was the then president who had strayed, but it was the women who copped it in the neck from Trump. Maureen Dowd, The New York Times columnist who knowns when to dip her pen in acid, especially when writing about the Clintons, went for Trump and his surrogates on Sunday. Reversing all the gender insults that emanate from the cabal at Trump Tower, she demolished their quaint notion that parlours are for girls and power is for boys. She lampoons Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani as "the Really Desperate Housewives of Trumpworld", adding: "Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old 'science' when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.

"Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency."