Donald Trump charged on Saturday that "corrupt" media were seeking to rig November's election in favor of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton -- who he suggested was "pumped up" on drugs at their last debate.
Trump's comments come as his White House bid has been plunged into chaos over snowballing accusations of sexual assault. Trump has cast himself as the victim of a "smear campaign," further escalating his attacks in a scorched-earth strategy heading into the final weeks of the race.
"Hillary is running for president in what looks like a rigged election," the 70-year-old told a fired-up rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. "The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president."
Trump tweeted out a similar allegation earlier Saturday to his 12 million followers, charging: "Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail. Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election."
In a bizarre new attack on the Democratic nominee, he suggested she had taken performance-enhancing drugs during their last debate.
He called for her to be screened ahead of their final televised duel Wednesday in Las Vegas.
"I don't know what is going on with her. At the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning. At the end, it was like, take me down, she could barely reach her car."
"I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. Why don't we do that?" Trump suggested.
The virulence of Trump's attacks on the Clinton camp have raised concerns about whether the real estate mogul would even acknowledge a defeat, and how his legions of fired-up supporters would react should he lose.
President Barack Obama echoed those concerns at a campaign rally Friday.
"This is somebody who... is now suggesting that if the election doesn't go his way, it's not because of all the stuff he's said, but it's because it's rigged and it's a fraud," Obama said.
"You don't start complaining about the refs before the game's even done. You just play the game, right?"
- 'Potemkin process' -
The Clinton camp issued an immediate response, accusing Trump of seeking to erode public faith in the November 8 vote.
"Campaigns should be hard-fought and elections hard-won, but what is fundamental about the American electoral system is that it is free, fair and open to the people," her campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement.
"This election will have record turnout, because voters see through Donald Trump's shameful attempts to undermine an election weeks before it happens."
Trump's recent controversies and attacks have eased pressure on Clinton having largely taken the focus off of the release of a new batch of e-mails leaked by WikiLeaks.
In the latest correspondences made public by the whistle-blowing site, Clinton tells senior staffers that the appearance of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks is preferable to none at all.
"Potemkin process is better than nothing," Clinton wrote to foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan and campaign chairman John Podesta.
The remark came in response to an email from Sullivan in which he sent Clinton a link to a New York Times article about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apology for his remarks that "Arab voters are going in droves to the polls" ahead of Israel's 2015 election.
"Unsurprisingly, Pragmatic Bibi makes an appearance," Sullivan wrote sarcastically in the message.
"This is an opening that should be exploited," Clinton said of Netanyahu’s apology.
A December 2015 correspondence between Sullivan, Podesta, and Stuart Eizenstat, a former US diplomat and close associate of the Clintons, revealed Netanyahu's positions on the US administration and US-Israel relations.
Eizenstat cited a senior Israeli official as saying that Netanyahu felt Clinton was "more instinctively sympathetic to Israel than the White House" and that the two had a "surprising good relationship."
Earlier this month WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pledged to publish "significant" new material on the US election before the vote, promising to reveal "interesting features of US power factions."
The White House has directly accused Russia of a series of email hacks, leaked to DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks by an online entity known as Guccifer 2.0 with the aim of interfering with the US election.
(Staff with agencies)
