Trump's Overnight Twitter Tirade Sums Up His Weaknesses

For a guy who has polling issues with women and a reputation for bad impulse control, this was an awfully strange strategy---if it was a strategy at all.
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Sleep. Remember sleep? The thing you were doing just a few hours ago, before you woke up, and the man who could potentially be the next President of the United States told you to "check out" a sex tape? Sleep was nice, wasn't it?

Donald Trump, apparently, doesn't get much sleep. Because, beginning at 5:14 am, the Republican nominee for President picked up his phone and started firing off tweet after tweet about former Miss Universe Contestant Alicia Machado, who Hillary Clinton name-checked during the first presidential debate last week. After Machado gained some weight following her Miss Universe win, she says Trump took to calling her Miss Piggy. Trump has since defended himself on Fox and Friends, saying, "She was the winner, and you know she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem."

But Trump wasn't finished digging himself into a hole with female voters just yet. Then came the tweets:

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And here we are. That Trump would unleash a tweetstorm before sunrise shouldn't surprise anybody at this point. But this one in particular seems to encapsulate two of the biggest issues dogging Trump's campaign: his attitude toward women and his apparent problems with impulse control. They also showcase his propensity for seeding conspiracy theories, just as he has with regard to Hillary Clinton's health and President Obama's citizenship.

During the first debate, Trump brought up his temperament, saying, "I think my strongest asset by far is my temperament. I have a winning temperament." Clinton's disagreed, and with good reason. Though both candidates have historically low favorability ratings, recent polls have shown Trump lagging far behind Clinton in terms of who voters believe has the better temperament to be president. And it seems that line of attack worked, considering most methodologically sound post-debate polls (not the flash polls Trump's team has been celebrating) show that Clinton got a boost from the debate. And according to one NBC News and SurveyMonkey poll, 27 percent of likely women voters said the debate made them think less of Trump.

For Trump to unleash such a temperamental attack against a woman—flaunting a sex tape that does not appear to exist, no less—is an altogether curious strategy, if it's a strategy at all.

Our advice to Trump: Get some sleep.