WASHINGTON ― Here’s a match made in heaven: loose-lipped Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and former Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), the man who tanked his 2012 Senate campaign when he said victims of “legitimate rape” have bodily mechanisms that prevent them from getting pregnant.
Akin said last week that he is still “clapping” for Trump, despite the New York real estate mogul’s penchant for offending nearly everyone.
“It’s such a breath of fresh air,” Akin told Morning Consult of Trump’s rhetoric. “When he says things and gets everybody excited, there are people like me who are clapping. It is still a free speech country.”
Trump’s troubled campaign descended into dumpster-fire territory last week when he kicked a woman with a crying baby out of his rally, insulted a Muslim American woman who lost her son in the Iraq War, and said he would expect his daughter to simply “find a new career” if she faced sexual harassment in the workplace.
He has also made racist comments against a Hispanic judge, refused to condemn the white supremacists supporting his campaign, and called women “fat pigs” and “dogs.”
The Republican Party is now panicking about Trump in the same way it panicked about Akin four years ago, after he commented on women becoming pregnant from rape by saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Party leaders, conservatives super PACs and the National Republican Senatorial Committee withdrew support from his campaign and pressured him to drop out of the election. He kept running and was slaughtered by Democrat Claire McCaskill in what should have been a much closer race.
Akin blamed the downfall of his campaign on the liberal media, and he said Trump is currently being treated as unfairly as he was.
“It’s because you’ve got an incredibly one-sided Democratic national media, and Republicans are scared to death of them,” Akin said. “Look at my race. I got hammered, really, because I’m pro-life. That’s the bottom line of it.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.