Question, how are all these insults going to fix are our decaying infrastructure, social security, bringing jobs back to the US from overseas, terrorism, and inequality and so on?

Ironically, the insults are likely to do more damage than the scandals.

It is hard to keep track of all of Donald Trump's almost daily legal and personal scandals as well as the many people and groups he's insulted. For those who like keeping score, I've provided a list. Both the scandals and the insults pose liabilities for Trump’s campaign, but perhaps ironically, it is the insults that are likely to do more damage than the scandals.

Supporters of Hillary Clinton seem to believe that each Trump scandal adds to voters’ negative assessment of his fitness to be president, like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger as it rolls downhill. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, each day’s scandal seems to push the previous one out of our collective memories. There are so many of them—and the details are so complicated and bizarre—that it is hard to keep track of them.

The most recent scandal involves the Trump Foundation, which, according to an investigation by the Washington Post, Trump has illegally used to avoid taxes, pay business expenses and create the misleading impression that he’s a generous philanthropist. Each day, the Post seems to discover yet another way Trump has misused the foundation to feather his nest. But no sooner have we started to understand the magnitude of Trump’s misdeeds with his foundation than we are confronted with another scandal—his illegal business dealings with Cuba during the U.S. embargo, which Newsweek just uncovered.

Trying to remember the scandals surrounding the Trump Foundation and Trump’s dealings with Cuba leaves little room in our brains to recall the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Trump for discriminating against blacks in his apartment buildings, or the illegal con job he foisted on the unwitting “students” of his bogus Trump University, or the many employees (waiters, dishwashers and plumbers, among others) and contractors he stiffed in his business dealings by failing to pay them for services they rendered. Then there's the women who have accused Trump of rape, as well as many other women who have accused Trump of being a sexual predator, or the stories that have linked Trump to the mafia in his hotel and casino business activities, or his misuse of at least four business bankruptcies to avoid paying his creditors and his taxes. And what about Trump’s failure to pay federal income taxes despite his wealth; his hiring of undocumented workers for one of his real estate projects and his failure, as a federal judge found, to pay them or to provide safe working conditions, as required by law; or Trump’s repeated fines for breaking rules related to his operation of his casinos; or the Federal Trade Commission’s $750,000 fine against Trump for failing to disclose his purchases of stock in two rival casino companies, which flouted the nation’s anti-trust laws; or Trump’s misuse of his $55,000 of campaign donations to purchase copies of his own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, from which he receives royalties—a violation of Federal Election Commission rules; or the foreign models who worked for Trump Model Management in this country without having proper visas and permits. And this is just a partial list!

One might think all of these scandals would lead voters to view Trump as a corrupt, irresponsible lawbreaker unfit to be president. But there are so many scandals that it is difficult to keep Trump’s crimes and calumnies straight. Most of us only have a big enough attention span to remember the most recent scandal.

On the other hand, most Americans have a pretty good memory for names and faces, so it is easier to remember at least some of the long list of people Trump has insulted, in part because we can identify with these individuals. We are all aware of Trump’s steady use of mockery, bullying and belittlement against people with whom he disagrees, who have criticized him, or whose looks or handicaps he finds troubling.

So while Clinton’s supporters might not gain much ground reminding voters of Trump’s multiple business and personal scandals, they are on firmer ground calling attention to the people who have been targets of Trump’s demeaning insults. That’s why Hillary Clinton scored big in the first debate Monday night when she brought up Trump’s history of calling women “pigs,” “slobs,” and “dogs,” and in particular, the insults he hurled at former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, calling her “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Piggy.” Unable to let Clinton’s comments pass, Trump has spent the last few days continuing his defamation of Machado for having gained weight while she was Miss Universe.

But voters might have some difficulty retrieving the specific epithets Trump has used against people over the years. So below is a partial list of the people he’s insulted and the words he’s used to attack them. (This list doesn’t even include Trump’s wholesale insults against Muslims, Mexicans and Jews, or his nasty and misinformed comments about rivals Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, President Obama, and others.)

Khizr and Ghazala Khan: After Khizr Khan—the father of Humayun, a U.S. Army captain who was killed in Iraq and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart—gave a speech at the Democratic convention condemning Trump for his comments about Muslims and pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution to ask if Trump knew about the right to equal protection, Trump struck back. Trump said Khan had “viciously attacked” him and erroneously claimed that Khan’s wife, Ghazala, was not allowed to speak because she was Muslim. “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say,” Trump said on ABC News.

Judge Gonzalo Curiel: Trump attacked Curiel, a judge who is presiding over a trial brought by people who were scammed by Trump University. Trump accused Curiel of having “an absolute conflict” that should prevent him from presiding over the Trump University case because Curiel, a United States citizen who was born in Indiana to immigrants from Mexico, is “of Mexican heritage.” Trump said that Curiel could not be fair because Trump is “building a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border. At a campaign rally, Trump claimed that “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater,” despite the fact that Curiel has ruled in favor of Trump on most of his lawyers' requests.

The Central Park Five: In 1989 five teenagers, four African Americans and one Latino, were wrongfully convicted of raping a 28-year-old white woman who was jogging in New York City. The media quickly labeled them the “Central Park Five.” As soon as they were arrested, Trump led the charge against them. He paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times, under the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back The Police!” In those ads, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

Trump’s words were hardly subtle—he was calling for the boys to die. All five teens pleaded not guilty at the trial but despite the lack of DNA evidence linking any of them to the crime scene, the jury found all five of them guilty. The judge sentenced them to serve five to 15 years in prison. Michael Warren, a respected New York civil rights lawyer who later represented the Central Park Five, said that Trump’s ads “poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim. Notwithstanding the jurors’ assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.”

In 2002, Matias Reyes, a violent serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence, confessed to the Central Park rape, stating that he had acted by himself. When the DNA evidence was re-examined, it showed that Reyes’ semen alone was found on the rape victim’s body. New York’s Supreme Court vacated the convictions against each member of the Central Park Five, whose lives had been shattered by their prison terms. If Donald Trump had had his way, each of them would have been given the death sentence for a crime they did not commit.

Serge Kovaleski: At a campaign rally, Trump flailed his arms and mocked Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from a chronic condition that limits the movement of his arms. Kovaleski had challenged Trump’s claim that after 9/11 Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks.
Megyn Kelly: When the Fox News anchor asked Trump about his many anti-women comments over the years, Trump said: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

Senator John McCain: At a candidate forum in Ohio, Trump mocked McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner in North Vietnam. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?”

Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face!” Trump told a Rolling Stone reporter on his private plane when Fiorina, then his rival for the Republican nomination, appeared on a television screen. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?

Pope Francis: After the pope criticized Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump said that the pope’s comments were “really not very nice.” But then he went further, claiming that the Islamic State viewed the Vatican as its “ultimate trophy” and that the pope “would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened.”

By
Peter Dreier