GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Plunging deeper into campaign controversy, Donald Trump attempted to publicly shame a former beauty queen Friday for her “disgusting” sexual past and encouraged Americans to watch a “sex tape” he said would support his case.

Even some of Trump's supporters shook their heads at his latest outburst, which could further hurt him among the nation's women, many of them already skeptical, whose votes he'll badly need to win election.

“Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” read a missive from Trump posted on Twitter at 5:30 a.m.

That referred to 1996 Miss Universe Alicia Machado, a Venezuela-born woman whose weight gain he has said created terrible problems for the pageant he formerly owned.

Trump's pre-dawn tweetstorm ricocheted across the campaign trail.

Trump's campaign accused the media and Hillary Clinton of colluding to set him up for fresh condemnation, to which Clinton retorted, “His latest Twitter meltdown is unhinged, even for him.”

“Who gets up at 3 o'clock in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack?” Clinton asked.

She said Trump's tweets against Machado show that he is “temperamentally unfit” to be president.

Campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri said Clinton did not help Machado become a citizen.

The tweetstorm sparked criticism on the substance of Trump's remarks and how they derail his anti-Clinton message. At the same time, the tweets drowned out Clinton's policy speech, delivered Friday from Fort Pierce, Fla., on her plans to expand public service. It was another example of the challenge she faces as she seeks to give voters a more uplifting message — and a reason to vote for her, not just against Trump.

Machado took to Facebook to say Trump's tweets were part of a pattern of “demoralizing women,” calling them “cheap lies with bad intentions.”

Planned Parenthood said it showed that Trump's “misogyny knows no bounds.”

And Clinton said they showed anew why someone with Trump's temperament “should not be anywhere near the nuclear codes.”

With less than 40 days left in the election, Trump's broadside threw his campaign into a fresh round of second-guessing the candidate's instincts and confusion about what to do next.

To believers in traditional political norms, the tirade seemed like the opposite of what was needed to win over female, Hispanic and young American voters whose support could well determine the election.

Shaming Machado over intimate details from her past could be risky as Trump tries to win over female voters, many turned away by such personal attacks. It also risks calling further attention to the thrice-married Trump's own history with women.

Charges of lying flew back and forth.

What kind of a man, she asked, “stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?”

But Trump implored voters not to believe news stories about his campaign citing anonymous sources.

“There are no sources, they are just made up lies!” he tweeted.

Trump's most vocal allies seemed at a loss of words.

“He's being Trump. I don't have any comment beyond that,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a top supporter.

Generally chatty and occasionally critical of Trump, Gingrich said tersely that Trump sometimes does “strange things,” but that Clinton lies. “I'll let you decide which is worse for America.”

But Trump's inner circle followed his lead by refusing to concede any missteps. Trump returned with a new tweet invoking Clinton's famous ad from her 2008 campaign portraying her as the best candidate to pick up an urgent call at the White House at 3 a.m.

“For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o'clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!” Trump wrote.

Trump's tweets appeared to refer to footage from a Spanish reality show in 2005 in which Machado was a contestant and appeared on camera in bed with a male contestant. The images are grainy and do not include nudity, though Machado later acknowledged in the Hispanic media that she was having sex in the video.

Also Friday, the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates says there was indeed a problem with Trump's microphone during Monday's debate.

The commission said on its website that “there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall.”

There was no noticeable issue with the sound on television.