Trump's rhetoric is harsher than previous nominees
WASHINGTON — It's not every presidential election in which one candidate suggests the other should be in prison.
In fact, it's never really happened.
Presidential elections have never been for the faint of heart, but for more than two centuries the harsher attacks have tended to come from campaign aides and surrogates — duties Donald Trump has now assumed for himself.
"Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States," Trump said in a highly anticipated speech on Wednesday in which he also described his Democratic opponent as a "world-class liar' who has engaged in "theft."
Amid campaign troubles, Trump blasts Clinton as 'world-class liar'
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
This kind of rhetoric — and worse — has surfaced in previous presidential elections but is rarely voiced by the candidate himself.
"It's coming not from the surrogates, but the man on top," said presidential historian Gil Troy. "That's what makes it truly historic."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said "the boundaries of traditional campaign discourse have been breached" by Trump.
Innuendo and ad hominem attacks, once shunned by presidential nominees themselves, "are being normalized in this campaign," she said.
5 most explosive attacks Trump leveled against Clinton
To be sure, Trump's outspokenness is part of his appeal, according to dozens of supporters who have attended his political rallies over the past year who cited his lack of "political correctness" as a virtue. Backers agree with Trump's attacks on Clinton, citing an ongoing Justice Department investigation into her use of private email while at the State Department and questions about contributions to the Clinton Foundation.
Clinton and aides said her Republican opponent is making "personal" attacks because he has nothing to say on substance.
Trump's speech Wednesday featured "a litany of nutty conspiracy theories, hypocritical attacks and over a dozen outright lies debunked by fact checkers," said Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin. "Even on the teleprompter, Donald Trump can’t help but sell the kitchen sink of discredited attacks, rather than offer a real plan for the American people.”
Fact check: Trump’s attack on Clinton’s character
In his remarks, Trump cited a letter from a woman whose policeman son was killed by an undocumented immigrant and wrote that Clinton "needs to go to prison to pay for the crimes she has already committed against this country."
Presidential candidates have always been attacked. Even George Washington, a consensus pick to become the first president, faced anonymous criticism and second-guessing.
The 1800 election — in which challenger Thomas Jefferson unseated President John Adams, the nation's first peaceful transfer of power — also featured some of the nastiest rhetoric in political history, courtesy of newspapers that played favorites.
One of Jefferson's pamphleteers described Adams as a "hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." The Adams people said Jefferson's election would lead to "your dwellings in flames ... female chastity violated ... children writhing on the pike."
Presidential candidates in the 19th century didn't publicly campaign much but still found themselves subjected to personal attacks: Andrew Jackson's wife, Abraham Lincoln's looks, Grover Cleveland's out-of-wedlock child. But the attacks came from critics in general, not other candidates.
When presidential candidates began actively campaigning in the 20th century, they tended to stay away from harsh personal attacks.
In 1948, facing long odds, President Harry Truman criticized Republicans viciously on the campaign trail, saying, for example, that they had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back." But he spent relatively little time on GOP opponent Thomas Dewey himself.
President Richard Nixon's campaign team in 1972 launched a number of attacks on Democratic opponents, including the Watergate break-in that would eventually lead to Nixon's resignation two years later. Democratic nominee George McGovern raised Watergate in the fall campaign of 1972, but, Jamieson said, his "rhetoric was actually very careful and measured."
She added, "he never suggested Nixon should be jailed."
Technology — radio, television, and now the Internet — has changed the nature of political attacks over the years, but usually for aides, not nominees.
When President Lyndon Johnson wanted to accuse Barry Goldwater of risking nuclear war during the 1964, his campaign did it via a famous, once-aired television commercial featuring a little girl plucking petals from a daisy right before an atomic explosion.
When President George W. Bush sought re-election in 2004, an outside group attacked John Kerry's Vietnam war record, adding the term "swiftboating" to the political attack lexicon.
Election flashback quizzes: 10 ways to distract yourself from the 2016 race
Social media has helped Trump change the rules of attack.
Troy, whose latest book is The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, said the presumptive GOP "is in many ways the candidate that Twitter made — with all of life, let alone politics, reduced to a series of 140-character rhetorical drive-by shootings."
James Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, noted that "It's a very personal campaign — on both sides."
Trump's approach is less of a surprise at this point because of the aggressive rhetoric he employed in winning the Republican presidential campaign, blasting candidates like "Lying" Ted Cruz and the "pathological" Ben Carson.
It also reflects cultural changes, Ceaser said, and declining standards of civility throughout society.
Trump "has a style of rhetoric that completely casts civility aside," Ceaser said.