Donald Trump wielded his presidential candidacy on Friday as a weapon for score-settling and venting personal grievances, using a campaign speech in North Carolina to attack the women who have accused him of sexual assault and unwelcome advances, and portraying himself as the victim of a vast conspiracy by the news media and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
With an angry speech that wheeled from one target to the next, Trump accelerated his decisive shift away from courting swing voters or delivering any semblance of a message aimed at the political mainstream.
Instead, having spent weeks on the defensive, battered by disclosures about his treatment of women and about his business dealings, Trump appears increasingly consumed with the idea that he has been wronged and bent on convincing his fans that sinister forces are to blame for his political decline.
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Trump told the restive crowd that his advisers want him to focus on his core economic message, but he said he had no intention of allowing his critics to go unanswered.
"My people always say, 'Oh don't talk about it. Talk about jobs. Talk about the economy,'" Trump said.
"But I feel I have to talk about them, because you have to dispute when somebody says something," he added of the allegations against him. "Fortunately, we have the microphone. We're able to dispute; some people can't."
Even as two new women came forward on Friday to say that he had groped them, Trump dismissed the mounting charges against him as "total fiction" and "lies, lies, lies." He assailed the motives of the women speaking out against him, and seemed to mock two of them as insufficiently attractive to draw his interest.
"Believe me, she would not be my first choice," Trump said of Jessica Leeds, who said Trump groped her on an airplane in the 1980s. He referred to Leeds, now 74, as "that horrible woman."
He was similarly dismissive of Natasha Stoynoff, a former writer for People magazine who accused Trump of physically accosting her during an interview. "Check out her Facebook page, you'll understand," he said.
Trump also ridiculed his opponent in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton, for saying that he had crowded her physically during their last debate, and he seemed to offer a dig at Clinton's physique. When Clinton walked in front of him, he told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina, "Believe me, I wasn't impressed."
And as he blasted the women who have made allegations against him as fabricators, Trump suggested that perhaps someone should make similar claims against President Barack Obama next.
Though Trump has said he will provide information to refute his accusers' stories wholesale, he offered no such evidence in North Carolina. He has also loudly threatened to sue multiple publications for printing the stories of his accusers, but by Friday evening no such suit had been filed.
Trump made only passing reference to the newest accusations against him on Friday. In an interview with The Washington Post, a woman named Kristin Anderson said Trump had slipped his hand beneath her skirt and grabbed her genitals at a Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.
Trump's spokeswoman denied the account, and Trump said in his speech that certain details were implausible because he rarely sits alone at nightclubs. But The Washington Post did not say Anderson had described Trump as being alone.
A second woman, Summer Zervos, a Republican and a former contestant on "The Apprentice," said at a news conference in Los Angeles that Trump had tried to seduce her over dinner at a hotel in 2007, grabbing her breasts and thrusting his pelvis into her body. Zervos, 41, appeared alongside Gloria Allred, the celebrity litigator and a Democrat who was a delegate for Clinton.
Trump denied in a statement several hours later that he ever had a meeting with Zervos at a hotel or "greeted her inappropriately." He again attacked the media and said he would "take my message directly to the American people."
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The claims against Trump have gained a momentum of their own since the revelation on Oct. 7 of a videotape in which he boasted to a television host about sexually assaulting women. That tape led to the direct questioning of Trump, at Sunday's debate, about whether he had ever actually done the things he described. Trump's denial prompted Leeds to come forward in an interview with The New York Times; Anderson said Leeds had inspired her to tell her story.
After learning of Leeds' story, Anderson told The Post, she decided: "Let me just back these girls up."
By lashing out in multiple directions and presenting himself as the target of a corrupt plot, Trump may deepen his emotional bond with voters who have turned to him as a kind of political wrecking ball aimed at Washington. But he is unlikely to improve his standing this way with the majority of voters who say in polls that he is ill-suited to the presidency and biased against women and minorities.
Democrats have called the charges women have made against Trump disqualifying. On Thursday in New Hampshire, Michelle Obama said she had been shaken by Trump's cavalier bragging about assault.
Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood and a prominent Clinton supporter, predicted women would revolt against Trump's remarks in North Carolina.
"If they weren't already convinced, today proved to Americans that Donald Trump is an abusive and vindictive monster," Richards said. "With every ugly and violent insult that comes out of his mouth, Trump loses a vote, and our country gains a feminist."
Leading Republicans have already pulled back from his campaign, and new signs of distance emerged Friday between Trump and the party he nominally leads. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., who is seeking re-election, released a television commercial saying he has "a lot of disagreements" with Trump. And in a closely fought congressional race in central New York, the National Republican Congressional Committee has an ad vowing that its candidate, Claudia Tenney, will "stand up to Hillary Clinton" — implying that Clinton will be the next president.
Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the speaker of the House, who announced this week that he would no longer defend Trump, ignored him entirely in a speech to college Republicans in Wisconsin. Ryan criticized Clinton and Democratic policies, but made no case for his own party's nominee.
Trump, who has savaged Ryan repeatedly this week, declined to revisit their conflict Friday afternoon.
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But Trump escalated his war on the news media, and unveiled a theory that The New York Times was attacking him at the behest of a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, who is the largest individual holder of New York Times Co. common shares.
Reporters for the newspaper, Trump said, should be seen as "corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and Hillary Clinton."
"No media is more corrupt than the failing New York Times," he said.
Trump's bitter attacks on the news media, and Slim in particular, seem to echo the precise language used by several of his advisers, Stephen Bannon and Roger Stone, who have long cast Slim as an ominous presence in the U.S. news media.
In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, said Slim had no involvement in the paper's news coverage. "Carlos Slim is an excellent shareholder who fully respects boundaries regarding the independence of our journalism," Sulzberger said. "He has never sought to influence what we report."
Trump has spoken in even darker and more apocalyptic tones in recent days, as his poll numbers have fallen: describing Clinton as deserving incarceration; warning that the election will be rigged; and suggesting that international bankers are colluding to bring about his defeat.
On Friday, he repeated his pledge to prosecute Clinton and encouraged his crowd in chants of "Lock her up." "For what she's done," he said, "they should lock her up."
Trump's conspiracy remarks drew open scorn and even laughter from Democrats. Campaigning for Clinton in Cleveland, Barack Obama poked fun at Trump for having spent years "trying to convince everybody he was a global elite, talking about how great his buildings are."
"All he had time for was celebrities, and now suddenly he's acting like he's a populist out there: 'Man, I'm going to fight for working people,'" Obama said. "Come on, man."