In search of answers about plummeting polls and reports of despair within his presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump questioned the role of a free press on Sunday, as his allies struggled to argue that their candidate remained focused on winning the general election.
At a Saturday night rally in Fairfield, Connecticut, Trump went so far as to say that his race is not against the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, but against journalists. “I’m not running against Crooked Hillary,” he told a crowd. “I’m running against the crooked media.”
On Sunday, the nominee challenged the application of first amendment rights: “It is not ‘freedom of the press’ when newspapers and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false!”
Trump has previously argued that Congress should “open up our libel laws” so that people could sue newspapers, although he himself has cited tabloid stories without evidence.
Earlier on Sunday, campaign chairman Paul Manafort tried to pour cold water on the reports that had enraged Trump.
“Trump is very plugged in,” Manafort told on CNN. “Very connected. We’re seeing crowds that are end of October numbers, not August numbers. He’s appearing to between 10, 15, 20,000 people. That tells you the campaign is working.”
The campaign chief also argued that Trump had “a substantive week”, noting the competing economic plans that he and Clinton each presented. “Our plan very clearly laid out how he was going to cut taxes, lower the tax rates for small businesses, how that would create more jobs. He talked about his trade policy.”
But Manafort was also forced to answer for Trump’s remark that “second amendment people” might act against Clinton, and a campaign staffer’s criticism of the parents of a US army captain killed in Iraq.
Manafort’s defence followed a New York Times report of confusion at the heart of the Trump campaign, quoting from more than 20 associates who anonymously described the candidate as increasingly angry, glum, and refusing to follow counsel from his advisers. Separately, Politico reported that Republican party leaders had started private talks about cutting off financial support for their nominee.
Trump’s campaign has put Politico on a so-called “blacklist” of organizations it denies press credentials to, and Trump tweeted that the Times “has become a newspaper of fiction”. On Saturday he wondered aloud about banning the outlet from his events.
Then Trump spent Sunday morning tweeting aspersions about the press, critiquing various elements of coverage and largely ignoring his opponent, despite recent, damaging reports about her relationship with donors and her record as a senator. On Sunday, CNN reported that the FBI would give Congress notes from agents’ three-hour interview with Clinton, over her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Clinton herself has quarreled with the press for years, and the Democratic nominee has not held an official press conference in more than 250 days.
Yet Trump persisted with his personal crusade, writing: “My rallies are not covered properly by the media. They never discuss the real message and never show crowd size or enthusiasm.”
Trump’s rallies are filmed in their entirety by a shared camera, and he often spends long sections of his speeches, including Saturday’s, denigrating journalists, sometimes by name. “I am not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media and her government protection process,” he added on Sunday.
In the background behind Trump and Manafort’s media criticism, new polling data shows Trump falling behind secretary Clinton by five or more points in key swing states, including Virginia, Colorado, Florida and Pennsylvania. A newly released NBC-Wall Street Journal poll shows Clinton leading in Virginia and Colorado by double digits.
Nationally, polling averages show Clinton with a nearly seven-point lead. Reflecting the average, a recent poll Washington Post/ABC poll showed Clinton leading 50% to 42%.
Meanwhile, the queue of Republicans looking to abandon Trump grew larger on Sunday. Carlos Gutierrez, a former cabinet member for George W Bush, told CNN that he would vote for Clinton.
“I am afraid of what Donald Trump would do to this country,” he said. “I am not thinking about a Republican. I am thinking about a US citizen. I think, at some point, you have to put the party aside and say, ‘What’s best for the country?’”
Meanwhile, Maine’s Republican senator Susan Collins, who wrote a scathing op-ed rejecting Trump last week, told CBS that while she respected his candor, “there’s a big difference between that and treating people with respect and common decency. And there’s where, in my judgment, Donald Trump has failed.”
Collins said she was taking a look at the Libertarian ticket “because it’s headed by two former Republican governors who are very successful governors”.
One of Trump’s few outspoken allies in the Senate, Jeff Sessions, defended the nominee’s erratic campaign in the general election. “He was so exuberant. He had a lot of fun in the primaries – he was really hammering away,” Sessions told ABC. “It’s a different thing to run a presidential election. You’re dealing with a different constituency.”
But as Republican officials scrambled to assert a coherent direction for their candidate’s campaign, Trump himself may have already offered the clearest sign of his strategy.
“I just keep doing the same thing I’m doing right now,” Trump said on Thursday, when asked about his plans to catch up to Clinton. “And at the end, it’s either going to work or I’m going to have a very, very nice long vacation.”
