Hillary Clinton refuses to comment on Donald Trump 'schlonged' comment

Even former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke is lavishing love on him

Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa (AP)

Donald Trump only has himself to blame. Again.

He has given female voters another reason to disdain him by putting a Yiddish term for penis (“schlong”) and Hillary Clinton in the same sentence. Ms Clinton, said The Donald, had been “schlonged” by Barack Obama when both ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Reuters)

At a rally in Michigan late on Monday, which saw frequent interruptions by hecklers who were summarily ejected, he mocked the former first lady for returning late to the stage midway through the latest Democratic debate.

Acknowledging she had been waylaid in the ladies, Mr Trump feigned horror. “I know where she went. It’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it.” But it was his description of how she lost to Mr Obama in the 2008 primaries that drew more attention.

“She was going to beat Obama,” Mr Trump told a ballroom full of supporters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “She was going to beat – she was favoured to win – and she got schlonged. She lost. She lost.”

Outrage is the fuel of the Trump campaign. And Mr Trump knows it. It’s what he said first about illegal Mexican immigrants – “rapists” and “criminals” – and then about Muslims that helped build his current lead in the Republican nomination race. He has also given fresh cover to white supremacists in America to expound racist views they previously hardly dared utter in public.

Even David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and far-right politician from Louisiana, is lavishing love on him.

Little that Mr Trump has said or done so far – not even his appeal, inadvertent or otherwise, to hate groups on the right – has slowed his march towards the Republican nomination, confounding the political commentator class and sending the party’s establishment in Washington into a terminal tizzy. However, a new national Quinnipiac poll today showed Ted Cruz rising fast beneath him.

But the Hillary Clinton camp is certain that all these issues, including the gap in his support from women, would return to haunt him in a general election. Indeed, the same Quinnipiac survey found that while almost a quarter of Americans said they would be “proud” to have Mr Trump as their President, 50 per cent said they would be “embarrassed”.

It explains why the push-back from the Clinton campaign to the “schlong” comment was limited to a tweet from communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “We are not responding to Trump, but everyone who understands the humiliation this degrading language inflicts on all women should,” she posted.

But Ms Clinton will not hold back if there is evidence that white supremacists in America are beginning explicitly to piggyback on Mr Trump’s rhetoric as a means to revive their political fortunes. She will ask whether voters really want a man with friends like these taking the keys to the White House.

In comments to The Washington Post, Rachel Pendergraft, the national organiser of the Knights Party, a political offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, said that the headlines being generated by Mr Trump almost daily were giving her members a new way to talk casually with the public in general about the issues her movement cares about. “One of the things that our organisation really stresses with our membership is we want them to educate themselves on issues, but we also want them to be able to learn how to open up a conversation with other people,” she said, adding that Mr Trump has meanwhile proved a huge morale-booster for her adherents. “They like the overall momentum of his rallies and his campaign. They like that he’s not willing to back down. He says what he believes and stands on that.”

If there is peril here for Mr Trump, he knows it. His campaign has fired two staff members for making racist slurs. Three weeks ago, he surprised some followers by criticising Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for suggesting in arguments about affirmative action in colleges that blacks may be better off in “slower-track” universities.

And he has tried to push Mr Duke away. “I don’t need his endorsement. I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement,” he told Bloomberg News. But the love of the neo-Nazis remains tenacious. There has been a surge of people visiting Stormfront, a website catering for white supremacists, thanks to the Trump campaign, its founder, Don Black, told Politico. “It’s all very surprising. I would have never expected he be the great white hope, of all people. But it’s happening. So that’s what we talk about. That’s what so many of our people are inspired by,” he said.