Donald Trump, Unshackled ... and Increasingly Unhinged

When Donald Trump gloated that "the shackles have been taken off me," I immediately wondered, how was he shackled?

Was that the shackled Trump, for example, who obsessively attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel in May, Khizr Khan and his family in July and Alicia Machado in September?

No, Trump actually was putting a defiant face on a stunning event in American political history: He, the Republican Party's nominee for president, was getting a cold shoulder from the party's highest ranking member in the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan.

With less than a month to go until Election Day, Ryan announced that he was washing his hands of the monumental task of defending Trump. The break apparently followed the release of an embarrassing 2005 "Access Hollywood' video. In it, Trump happily boasts about doing what amounts to sexual assault.

In fact, had there been some restraints on Trump, his whole campaign might actually give Democrat Hillary Clinton some competition again. Instead, Trump's "unshackled" state is looking increasingly unhinged.

Since his break with Ryan, he has been going deeper in the dark side of politics -- and I'm not talking about the African-American vote.

A "scorched-earth" strategy widely reported to have been urged on by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon has catered to Trump's paranoid side -- the side that caused him to question so vigorously President Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Now Trump is dangerously pressing buttons with his supporters by claiming the election is "rigged" by a conspiracy vast enough to take in Washington, the media, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and every poll that shows him falling behind, which is almost all of them.

Yet as his fortunes fall farther, he has become more isolated and more heavily influenced by such far-right friends as Bannon, who took Breitbart News site in a farther-right direction after founder Andrew Breitbart died.

Trump's attacks grew sharper against Clinton -- he has repeatedly called for her imprisonment -- against the Republican establishment and "the media," whom he also seems to want to imprison.

"This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged," Trump told a rally in West Palm Beach last week.

"The establishment and their media enablers will control ... this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed."

Nor does it help that Trump increasingly has called reporters "scum" and "corrupt."

Worse, he occasionally has shown more respect for overseas oligarchs than for our own press freedoms at home. In one glaring example, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump in December if his admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin was at all tempered by the country's history of killing critical journalists. Trump's response was: "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

Board members of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists included examples like that in a recent and rare declaration that "a Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history."

But another strong defense of the First Amendment hit Trump even closer to Trump Tower last week. After his attorney demanded a retraction by The New York Times of a story that quoted two women who claimed to have been groped by Trump without their consent, the Times's newsroom attorney, David McCraw, sharply suggested that Trump didn't have much of a reputation left to protect when it came to his treatment of women.

Trump has "bragged about his non-consensual touching of women," the letter said. "He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host's request to discuss Mr. Trump's own daughter as a 'piece of ass.' Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump's unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself."

So there. The Donald may well come up with another paranoid theory to explain this setback. But this isn't about a conspiracy. It's about the Constitution.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)