Poison a Clinton presidency

Trump’s new aim: Poison a Clinton presidency

But instead of engaging his conspiracy theories, Democrats respond by attacking his character.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

The trick out of Brooklyn isn't just to make Hillary Clinton win but to make her win as something other than a brain-damaged crook who stole the election and will spend the next four years selling out the government from her deathbed.

The Clinton de-legitimization project is now central to Donald Trump’s campaign and such a prime component of right-wing media that it’s already seeped beyond extremist chatrooms into “lock her up” chants on the convention floor, national news stories debating whether polls actually can be rigged, and voters puzzling over that photo they think they saw of her needing to be carried up the stairs.

The Clinton campaign has deliberately positioned its response as an offensive boomerang rather than a rebuttal: don’t defend against the attacks, just redirect fire at the messenger. “It holds up a mirror to Donald Trump and what his campaign is about, and says everything you need to know about Donald Trump and where these kinds of crazy conspiracy theories are coming from,” as one campaign aide put it.

But the Democrat’s team is aware of how this might factor in beyond November.

“Some of the campaign and allies' conspiracies are designed to delegitimize her personally. Most are simply designed to spread fear and mistrust. And I am sure if she wins, the right wing will continue to spread these theories,” said Clinton senior adviser Jennifer Palmieri. Palmieri is in favor of ignoring most of the wackiness but warned: “Just because they may have zero basis in truth doesn't mean they can't be corrosive. So in this cycle I believe you have to call out the truly destructive theories calmly, but aggressively, and in real time.”

Leading Democrats in Washington and beyond recognize Trump’s tactic because they’ve seen it before. President Barack Obama and his allies spent eight years sandbagged by the birth certificate/Bill Ayers/his-middle-name’s-Hussein attacks that all boil down to the same thinking now threatening Clinton: he’s a fake, his presidency either doesn’t count or is a Moorish-style Trojan Horse.

“We are already seeing an effort by the Trumpsters to undermine Hillary's presidency before it has even begun,” said longtime Clinton confidant Paul Begala.

Obama defenders argue that the GOP embrace of all the suggestions about him didn’t stop the president from getting a lot done, and in the meantime helped foster the very elements that propelled Trump to the nomination at the expense of traditional Republicans. But many are full of anxiety about going down this road again, and what it might mean both for sidetracking anything Clinton would want to get done in office and seeding a toxicity that would mean big problems for Democrats in the 2018 midterms and any other race they’ll have to run attached to her.

“It’s a longer strategy. It’s not that people believe that he wasn’t born in the United States,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), recalling how this played out for Obama and sketching the parallels she sees facing Clinton now. “It was the relentless negative attacks on him that really created a backdrop to pressure Republicans and hold them accountable not to work with him.”

So the pushback is emerging as a critical element of a campaign that polls show is looking less like a horse race at this stage, and more like the laying of a foundation for a first term and immediate uphill battle to get her re-elected. But the politics are made harder amid the drip-drip revelations from the newly released emails demonstrating the messy overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, which leave even many Clinton-inclined voters wondering what she was really up to and why it’s so hard for her to explain it.

Unlike birtherism or even switftboating in 2004, the Clinton campaign anticipated much earlier that right-wing chatter would eventually break through into the mainstream, and they could more easily attack it because they were taking on her opponent himself, rather than fake-name trolls.

For days, the Clinton campaign purposefully ignored questions coming at them from the Trump-intertwined Breitbart News about her health, according to an aide. But after Fox News host Sean Hannity devoted an episode of his show to a Clinton rumor medical panel, complete with an eager-to-please urologist in a white coat, they shifted gears: a long release emailed to reporters two weeks ago with sourced debunkings of all the rumors and a statement from her doctor attesting that supposedly leaked medical records were forged.

Clinton’s speech in Reno last Thursday was the strategic continuation, according to the aide, with the candidate going deep into Trump’s claims that he saw people celebrating on Sept. 11 and nursing connections to a Sandy Hook truther before folding in a “Donald, dream on,” as she disgustedly laughed that “his latest paranoid fever dream is about my health.”

“This is a much more concerted and explicit effort than what we saw in ’08,” said Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama’s top campaign aides and later a senior adviser in the White House. “There are real limits to what Clinton can do, because this is a message that will only be believed by the Republican base and she has little to no capacity to influence them. What she can do is de-legitimize the messenger and try to decouple Trumpism from Republicanism.”

If that works, and Clinton instead couples Trump in most voters’ minds with only craziness, “the attackers will be left with a small group of conspiracy theorists chanting around the campfire in the woods in the middle of nowhere and cheering them on,” said Guy Cecil, the head of the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities.

Mo Elleithee, who did tours separately as a top aide to Clinton and Tim Kaine and is now the executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, is nervous that the impact will be much deeper and long lasting.

“When you see Trump and his forces at best trying to delegitimize her, at worst trying to delegitimize the entire democratic process, we’re heading down a very dangerous path,” Elleithee said.

In addition to the health questions and rigged election talk, Elleithee cited Trump’s encouragement of Second Amendment voters to do something about a Clinton presidency’s court appointments and Trump adviser Roger Stone’s suggestion of bloodshed if Trump loses.

“I worry sometimes we just may not be able to pull back from this. Who can control that kind of raw energy and emotion? You’re irresponsibly unleashing it without having any ability to pull it back.”

Spokespeople for both House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell (R-Ky.) told reporters after Clinton’s speech last week that they hadn’t seen what she said, so couldn’t comment on it.

That, Pfeiffer said, is part of the problem—though in his opinion more of a problem for them than for Clinton long term.

“There is a cancer at the core of the Republican base that is exacerbated by its leadership being not-so-silent enablers of this stuff, so it has done more damage to them than to Obama,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer’s is the more optimistic, partisan take.

Stabenow, while confident that Clinton will win and be a good president, is also confident that Trump isn’t going away. Clinton’s been fighting crazed attacks for 25 years and knows what she’s up against, Stabenow said, but Trump’s a “hustler,” Stabenow said, and will be pushing divisions long past Election Day that will cut at any hopes of unity or reality for Clinton’s “Stronger Together” slogan.

That’s what happened with Obama eight years ago, she said, to the detriment of Obama and Democrats along the way.

“He ran on the message of hope and change,” Stabenow said. “Mitch McConnell and Republicans knew that if nothing changes for working people, they would lose hope. It’s as simple as that. They wanted to create a scenario where people would lose hope. And they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”