Trump goes after 'disloyal' GOP
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lashed out at US House Speaker Paul Ryan and other "disloyal" Republicans on Tuesday, vowing to campaign in whatever style he wants now that the party establishment has largely abandoned him.
Trump, in a barrage of Twitter posts, condemned the Republicans who have backed away from his White House run, deepening a rift in the party over his campaign for the Nov 8 election.
"It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to," Trump said on Twitter, adding he would engage Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on his own terms.
Describing "disloyal" Republicans as more difficult than Clinton, he said: "They come at you from all sides. They don't know how to win - I will teach them!"
A string of Republican officials and officeholders have distanced themselves from Trump since a 2005 video surfaced on Friday showing him bragging crudely to a reporter about groping women and making sexual advances.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely voters released on Tuesday found 58 percent of Republicans wanted Trump to stay atop their party's ticket and 68 percent said the GOP leadership should stand by him.
Trump slammed Ryan as a "very weak and ineffective leader" and complained in another tweet that it was hard to do well with "zero support" from Ryan and others.
Trump also took aim at US Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, who said on Saturday that he could not vote for Trump.
"The very foul mouthed Sen. John McCain begged for my support during his primary (I gave, he won), then dropped me over locker room remarks," Trump said on Twitter.
Among the emails made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks was one from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill. "Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term," Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.
Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly a week after AP revealed the server's existence.
WikiLeaks began releasing on Oct 7 what it said were years of messages from accounts used by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He has acknowledged his emails were hacked.
In May 2015, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted other staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton's work-related emails by January in response to requests by news organizations.
