The Trump campaign announced a new campaign strategy Wednesday: Remind American voters at every possible turn how terrible this election is with an eye on sufficiently depressing turnout to allow Trump to carry the election 1–0. The demographic linchpin in this un–Rock the Vote strategy is women, particularly millennial women. The Trump campaign thinking goes: If women aren’t voting for our guy, the reasons for which seem self-evident, let’s do whatever we can to make sure they don’t go vote at all. Too bad better angels went extinct in June 2015.
The Trump campaign’s new strategy to secure 189 electoral votes and provoke a national anxiety attack is based on the Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones gambit he rolled out on Sunday before the debate. The point will be to muddy the waters, declare equivalency between all misdeeds real and imagined, blame the media, and hope women stay home. “Once the campaign decided to put forward the strategy of using the victims of Bill and Hillary Clinton from the ’90s,” deputy campaign manager David Bossie told Bloomberg, “others came forward because they see the media coverage. Now, we have an opportunity to introduce new material into the campaign to educate voters on how they treat women.”
The new, more nuclear(!) Trump campaign effort is the brainchild of CEO Stephen Bannon, Bossie, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and is set to kick off Thursday night where else but on a one-hour Fox News special hosted by Sean Hannity.
From Bloomberg:
On Tuesday, Bannon laid out the campaign’s argument. “She’s led a program of victim intimidation,” Bannon told Trump staffers, according to two advisers who were present. “This has nothing to do with consensual sexual affairs and infidelities. This is Bill. We’re going to turn him into Bill Cosby. He’s a violent sexual predator who physically abuses women who he assaults. And she takes the lead on the intimidation of the victims.”
Asked how the campaign would reach millennial women — few of whom watch Sean Hannity — an adviser said that Trump himself will force the national media to focus on Clinton’s alleged intimidation of sexual assault victims. “Trump’s gonna force it into the system,” one adviser said. “By tweeting, by just moving it out there. The mainstream media will be embarrassed not to cover this.” The campaign plans to highlight a tweet from last November in which Clinton wrote: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported.”
… The Republican nominee’s decision to close out his campaign by attacking what he alleges to be the Clintons’ history of sexual violence suggests the next few weeks could be among the ugliest in modern presidential history.
In fact, the (extra) horribleness has already begun. “You are a disgusting human being,” Trump told the female New York Times reporter that called him for comment on the latest accusations of sexual misconduct reported by the paper Wednesday.
Welcome to nuclear winter. It’s actually worse than I imagined.
