So you think this presidential campaign can’t get any more disgusting than Donald Trump bragging about impulsively grabbing attractive women by the crotch?
Meet Brad Littlefield of Sanford. He likes to dress up Hillary Clinton in a skimpy bathing suit.
“I dunno, she looks kinda hot here! … just sayin! … bahahahaha!” chortled Littlefield, a former Sanford city councilor, in a recent Internet post.
Littlefield’s pièce de resistance: A Photoshopped image of a smiling Clinton atop the semi-nude body of a woman wearing an extremely revealing red-and-white thong with blue neck straps that barely cover her breasts.
It was right there on the “Mainers for Trump/Pence 2016” Facebook page until the wee hours of Saturday morning. That’s when Littlefield, upon seeing the message I sent him inquiring about it, hit the “delete” button.
But, by gosh, he’s still proud of it.
“The post was rhetorical,” he wrote in a series of back-and-forth messages later in the morning. “I am offended by Hillary’s behaviour toward this country.”
Rhetorical? How exactly can a doctored photo of the Democratic nominee for president be rhetorical?
“Perhaps ‘satire’ is a better term,” Littlefield wrote.
I don’t know. I was kind of leaning toward “misogynistic.”
To be clear, “Mainers for Trump/Pence 2016” is not the Trump campaign’s official Maine Facebook page.
That was emphasized Saturday by Trump campaign State Director Christie-Lee McNally, who also noted that Littlefield “is not working for me or on the campaign.”
Try telling Littlefield that.
He introduces himself on his own Facebook page, right under the sign “Deplorables for Trump 2016,” as “Team Trump Maine, Co-coordinating the get out to vote volunteers for Maine’s 1st Congressional Dist.”
Meaning?
“I am unpaid and have been working with MeGOP to coordinate volunteers for CD#1,” Littlefield wrote. “I was placed on a committee … to organize the volunteers … by the Me GOP… in June.”
His point person in Augusta?
“Joe Turcotte,” replied Littlefield, referring to the Maine Republican Party’s political director. (My email to Turcotte requesting comment received no response.)
To which Jason Savage, the Maine party’s executive director, replied in an interview, “Brad, early on, was involved with the Trump campaign. Brad has no formal or informal position with the Maine Republican Party.”
As for the screen-grabbed image of Clinton, which I sent him via email, Savage responded, “That post is reprehensible. It’s not coming from the Maine Republican Party. We’re not going to sit here and try to defend every single thing that one of 12,000 people who are out there posts on Facebook.”
Fair enough.
Still, Littlefield’s message, as well as the platform from which he launched it, is clearly a sign of these woebegone times. Not to mention a reflection of the Trump campaign’s Maine organization – or the lack thereof.
Consider: The Maine campaign’s official Facebook page, “Maine for Donald Trump@TrumpMaine,” has thus far attracted only 58 “likes.”
Littlefield’s renegade page, on the other hand, boasted as of Saturday 1,296 “members” – people who actually have taken the time to join up and be publicly counted.
Thus Littlefield’s sexist bile, which puts him in lockstep with the now-reeling Trump, appears to have a much wider audience than whatever the Maine campaign has managed to put out there.
Littlefield last served on the Sanford City Council in 2013. He blames the media, of course, for all that ails Trump’s candidacy as it approaches meltdown with Election Day weeks away.
Referring to Friday’s release of audio and video showing the depth of Trump’s depravity toward women, Littlefield wrote, “Apparently Trump is so bad the press has to reach back 11 years to find something in his background … pleeeease.”
So, just for the record, how might Littlefield feel if some online troll did to one of his two adult daughters what he did to Hillary Clinton?
“I would counsel my daughter BEFORE she entered politics that everything is on the table,” he replied.
Right. And if some crackpot virtually defiled her for all the world to see, that would be fair game in Littlefield’s book.
So much for conservative family values.
One more question for Littlefield: If there’s really nothing wrong with the photo of Clinton, why did he so hurriedly take it down while the rest of the world slept on Saturday?
“SOME took it literally,” he replied. “I removed it for that reason.”
Huh? How else might one take it?
“I am reminded of a story about a blind person who walks into a room and the mantle is at chin level,” Littlefield continued. “When he questions the location of the mantle … the room attendant said … ‘the world is not going to pad its corners for you.’ ”
Well, that certainly clarifies things. And how exactly was this man ever elected to the Sanford City Council?
In distancing himself from Littlefield, the Republican Party’s Savage cautioned that “he is one guy with a platform.”
At the same time, Savage noted, the Maine Republican Party includes “a lot of really good, caring concerned people.”
No argument there.
But here’s the problem. Thanks in no small part to Trump, not to mention the Republican Party that put him at the top of its ticket, blowhards like Littlefield have been inflated beyond all reason.
They rail, as Littlefield did, against “Hillary Clinton’s offensive behaviour ie untruthfulness about her emails, her email server, her cover-up of her untruthfulness … and Benghazi.”
Then, out of the blue, they post a picture of her half-naked.
They laud Trump as a political messiah who, while exhibiting neither a shred of knowledge nor a sliver of an actual plan, will somehow Make America Great Again.
Then, when he’s exposed once and for all for the male chauvinist pig he truly is, they unleash their ire on the messengers.
They proudly post signs like “Deplorables for Trump” – Littlefield offered to send me one once the latest shipment comes in – to push back on Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment of a few weeks ago.
Yet while doing so, they fail to see how pitch-perfectly they’re proving Clinton’s point.
We’ll never know for sure just how closely Littlefield was tied to the Trump campaign and the Maine Republican Party before they so summarily gave him the heave-ho this weekend.
But like it or not, they own the guy.
Upon hearing that Savage had disavowed any connection between the party and his Trumplike approach to political activism, Littlefield replied, “Guess I will need to ask them to stop asking me for help LOL.”
Or he could just crawl back under his rock.
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