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.
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