Just when you thought the Republican presidential race couldn’t go any lower, Donald Trump said this today about former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whom he endorsed in the 2012 presidential campaign:
TRUMP: “He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’ he would have dropped to his knees.”
Despite vulgar tirades like this, Trump — a serial adulterer and philanderer — is amazingly popular with evangelical conservatives, a group whose influence on the GOP branded it as the party of “family values.”
Trump led the GOP field among evangelicals in an NBC poll in January and won with the evangelical vote in the South Carolina primary — this despite the fact that just days before the primary he’d shocked and repulsed a focus group of rank and file South Carolina GOP voters when they were shown a video of Trump dropping an F-bomb at a campaign rally in New Hampshire.
In the video, Trump exhorted New Hampshire voters to reject local companies who move their business overseas. “And you can tell them to go fuck themselves!” Trump shouted to the cheering crowd. (He mouthed the word “fuck” but it was so clear what he said that it was bleeped out to meet broadcast decency standards.
At the focus group, all ten voters physically recoiled when they heard Trump’s foul language. Several of them said they found his behavior to be “disqualifying.”
After Bloomberg News and MSNBC reported the story, Trump promised supporters in Louisiana, “I won’t use foul language I’m just not going to do it. I’ll never do it again, actually, and I’ll never even copy what somebody asks me to say.”
About two weeks after he dropped that F-bomb, Trump disparaged former Mexican Pres. Vicente Fox for doing the same thing — and claimed that he, Trump, would never use that sort of language.
In a television interview, Fox mocked Trump’s robotically repeated claim that, as president, he’ll build a wall along the US border and make Mexico pay for it.
“I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall,” Fox said.
Trump responded with this pearl-clutching tweet:
FMR PRES of Mexico, Vicente Fox horribly used the F word when discussing the wall. He must apologize! If I did that there would be a uproar!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2016
On Feb. 1, Trump told a crowd in New Hampshire, “If we are attacked, somebody attacks us, wouldn’t you rather have Trump as president if we’re attacked? We’ll beat the shit out of them.”
Earlier in the campaign, Trump called his rival Sen. Ted Cruz a “pussy.” And after the first Fox News debate, he suggested that moderator Megyn Kelly had questioned him aggressively because she was menstruating.
Trump’s repeated cursing and use of coarse imagery is a first and a new low in U.S. presidential political history. A decent man would be ashamed of himself.
