Donald Trump Releases His Inner Ape
Excuse me? Are we Americans crying out to have our own Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Un? Or was Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin spinning out of control?
His staff later said he was joking with that jail thing. But the deeper truth is that Trump's desperation was showing. His lack of preparation and abundance of missed opportunities in his first debate had put his poll numbers into a slide and his Grand Old Party's leaders into a panic.
Worse, an anonymously released 2005 video a couple of days before the second presidential debate caught Trump bragging lewdly and crudely about using his fame to force himself on women.
Suddenly, dozens of prominent Republicans were withdrawing their support and looking for ways to force their nominee off the ticket, perhaps to replace him with his more traditionally conservative and sane running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
So with less than 30 days to go to Election Day, a time when most nominees are turning their appeals to moderate undecided or uncommitted swing voters, Trump was pivoting back to shore up his hardcore Hillary-hating base.
Against that backdrop Trump's bombastic behavior begins to make some sense, as Farage suggests, in a simian sort of way. In fact, celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall agrees.
In a pre-debate analysis by journalist James Fallows in the October issue of The Atlantic, he quotes her as saying before Trump clinched the GOP nomination that, "In many ways, the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals."
"In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays -- stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks," she said, according to Fallows. "The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position."
Sound familiar? Imagine a big ape -- an orange-haired orangutan sounds about right -- wearing a baseball cap that says, "Make the Rain Forest Great Again."
Clinton's supporters complain that she passed up opportunities to wash Trump away in a flood of facts. But with her lead in polls widening, she refused to take Trump's bait. Instead she followed the old advice often attributed to Napoleon: Never interfere with an enemy while he is in the process of destroying himself.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
