Hillary Clinton handed Donald Trump two potentially detrimental storylines and, in a fresh bout of restraint, the Republican presidential nominee hasn’t tried to grab both issues at once.
Over the past 24 hours, Trump’s team has urged its surrogates, and the candidate himself, to tamp down talk of the Democratic nominee’s health and instead focus unrelentingly on her casting tens of millions of his supporters into a “basket of deplorables,” calling them “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” (Clinton has expressed regret for saying such labels applied to “half” his backers.)
Trump, who bulldozed his way to the GOP nomination insulting his opponents and various ethnic and religious groups, expressed outrage at Clinton’s “vile,” “smearing” comments during a speech in Baltimore on Monday and said the former secretary of state had disqualified herself from public office.
Out: Trump’s 15-month focus on being political incorrect. In: Trump’s umbrage over something Clinton said that was politically incorrect — and a bold, new declaration that Clinton could no longer “credibly campaign” for the presidency.
“You cannot run for president if you have such contempt in your heart for the American voter,” Trump told the National Guards Association of the United States. “You cannot lead this nation if you have such a low opinion of its people.”
Earlier on Monday, Trump said on “Fox & Friends” that Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark was “the single biggest mistake of the political season.”
His campaign sought to capitalize quickly, rolling out with a new TV ad on Monday morning — by far its fastest turn-around of the general election — accusing her of attacking “People like you, you and you.” The ad was sent to TV stations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina, the campaign announced, four battleground states that are the linchpin of any Trump path to the White House.
The ad closes with the words “viciously demonizing” appearing on screen. Trump used virtually the same phrase in his Baltimore speech, another sign of new discipline and synergy between Trump on the stump and the campaign operating behind the scenes.
The message that Trump and his surrogates are trying to drive: Clinton’s remarks offered a window into the “real” Hillary Clinton.
“It shows the true side of her; she was relaxed, she was with friends, she was at a fundraiser, and then the real Hillary comes out. The fake Hillary’s saying, ‘I stand for all Americans,’” Rep. Chris Collins of New York, the first congressman to back Trump during the primary and a key Capitol Hill ally, said in an interview Monday. “Well, no, she just wrote off half of the Republican Party.”
When Trump himself was asked on Fox about Clinton’s buckling-knees episode and the later announcement from her campaign that she had pneumonia, he mostly pivoted. “I hope she gets well soon. I don’t know what’s going on,” Trump said.
The belief among Trump’s allies and advisers is that the media will pursue the health storyline without Trump inserting himself, while he can keep the “deplorables” remark in the headlines. Trump got an assist from an unlikely source on Monday when one of President Barack Obama’s former top advisers, David Axelrod, tweeted, “Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”
Collins praised Trump’s restraint around Clinton’s health and credited his new campaign manager.
“The day that Kellyanne Conway came on board, Mr. Trump has been significantly more disciplined and on message, and that’s not a coincidence,” Collins said.
Although Trump campaign officials are trying to avoid directly addressing Clinton’s health, they appear more than happy to draw attention to his schedule, as she canceled a fundraising trip to the West Coast.
“I’m looking at the schedule for this week, and we’ll be in like seven different swing states, five or six rallies, fundraisers, roundtables,” Conway said on MSNBC on Monday. “It’s grueling, but people expect you to go to right where they are. If you just do fundraisers all the time, or a speech here and there, it doesn’t really work for voters.”
Clinton canceled a planned fundraising trip to California on Monday and Tuesday. Clinton’s campaign will “release additional medical information” later this week, spokesman Brian Fallon said Monday, adding that her dizziness on Sunday was unrelated to her 2012 fall that resulted in a concussion.
Trump, who has so far refused to offer up any medical records of his own, has scheduled an appearance on “The Dr. Oz Show” on Thursday, when he is expected to release the results of a physical exam he has said he underwent last week.
Tim Miller, a former communications director for Jeb Bush and outspoken Trump opponent, acknowledged that, “Yes, he has shown a level of restraint that we haven’t seen out of him to date, but that is the minimum expectation for someone running for national office for an entire campaign.”
“He’s managed to do it 36 hours,” Miller said, “so I don’t think we should get too excited yet.”
Indeed, Trump was hardly a perfect model of discipline on Monday. He called in to CNBC and continued his use of a racialized slur against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (calling her “Pocahontas”), declared inaccurately that the Federal Reserve is “obviously not independent” and that its chair, Janet Yellen, “should be ashamed of herself” for keeping interest rates low.
But those comments seemed to quickly dissipate, and Trump’s Baltimore event provided fresh fodder for the “deplorables” storyline as Trump took offense to Clinton’s generalization of his supporters. “She divides people into baskets as though they were objects, not human beings,” Trump said.
Then the candidate who, despite more than a year of attacks, has refused to apologize to anyone over anything specific — he’s offered broad regret once — demanded an apology from Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton,” Trump said, “still hasn’t apologized to those she’s slandered.”
Trump shrugs at Clinton’s health to level ‘deplorables’ attack
Shane Goldmacher
Politico September 12, 2016
