Washington // Some of the Republican Party's biggest financial donors have urged its national committee to drop presidential candidate Donald Trump in the wake of accusations he sexually assaulted women, The New York Times reported.
In a further sign the Republican presidential candidate’s free-falling campaign is sowing deep divisions within a party in crisis, the paper quoted some of those who have given millions of dollars to Republicans as saying the scandal surrounding the real-estate billionaire threatens the party with lasting damage unless it repudiates him.
“At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognise that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children – especially your daughters,” Missouri businessman David Humphreys told the newspaper, which said he contributed more than $2.5 million (Dh9m) in the past four years.
“He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” New York investor Bruce Kovner told the daily.
“Even for loyalists, there is a line beyond which the obvious moral failings of a candidate are impossible to disregard,” he wrote in an email. “That line has been clearly breached.”
However, the party’s major donors have little leverage over a candidate who is relying largely on his own money and many small donations from his far-right electoral base.
The Republican rift deepened on Monday when the house of represenatives speaker Paul Ryan told hundreds of fellow party legislators that he would no longer defend Mr Trump.
Since then, at least eight women have accused Mr Trump, 70, of making unwanted advances, most of them after he asserted in Sunday’s debate with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton that he had never sexually assaulted a woman.
The accusations surfaced after a video emerged of Mr Trump boasting in 2005 of groping women with impunity because he was famous, sending the White House race into unprecedented levels of vulgarity.
The comments drew strong condemnation from first lady Michelle Obama during a campaign stop for Mrs Clinton on Thursday.
“Last week we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. I can’t believe that I’m saying that: a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” Mrs Obama said.
But Mr Trump remains defiant, castigating his accusers as “horrible liars” and accusing Mrs Clinton of conspiring with the media and a “global elite” to sabotage his campaign.
President Barack Obama addressed those accusations in a campaign speech for Mrs Clinton on Friday.
“This is a guy who spent all his time hanging around trying to convince everybody he was a global elite,” he told a rally in Cleveland, Ohio.
“All he had time for was celebrities and now suddenly he’s acting like he’s a populist out there,” Mr Obama said.
Also on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said evidence casting doubts on the claims of sexual conduct against Mr Trump would be released soon.
"I know there's more information that's going to be coming out that will back his claim that this is all categorically false," Mr Pence said on the CBS show This Morning.
* Agence France-Presse