Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump increased his attacks on a former beauty queen with a vague and unsubstantiated allegation about a sex tape in pre-dawn Twitter posts on on Friday, and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton denounced him as “unhinged”. Mr. Trump’s refusal to drop his invective against Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe from Venezuela whom he criticised for gaining weight after she won the crown in 1996, threatened to damage his already weak standing among women and Hispanics.
With less than six weeks to go until the Nov. 8 election, Mr. Trump made reference to a sex tape involving Ms. Machado, who had publicly denounced him all week as a humiliating bully. “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting [check out sex tape and past] Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” Mr. Trump said in his Twitter messages in the early hours of Friday.
At a campaign rally in Coral Springs, Florida, Ms. Clinton said the episode was evidence that “a man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have the nuclear codes.”
Later on Friday, BuzzFeed said Mr. Trump made an appearance in a Playboy softcore pornographic movie from 2000 that it said it had obtained from an online adult video store in New York state. —
