Hillary Clinton Piles Up Research in Bid to Needle Donald Trump at First Debate
Hillary Clinton’s advisers are talking to Donald J. Trump’s ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” seeking insights about Mr. Trump’s deepest insecurities as they devise strategies to needle and undermine him in four weeks at the first presidential debate, the most anticipated in a generation.
Her team is also getting advice from psychology experts to help create a personality profile of Mr. Trump to gauge how he may respond to attacks and deal with a woman as his sole adversary on the debate stage.
.. Mr. Trump is taking the opposite tack. Though he spent hours with his debate team the last two Sundays, the sessions were more freewheeling than focused, and he can barely conceal his disdain for laborious and theatrical practice sessions.
.. she is searching for ways to bait him into making blunders.
.. Mr. Trump, a supremely confident communicator, wants viewers to see him as a truth-telling political outsider and trusts that he can box in Mrs. Clinton on her ethics and honesty.
.. He has been especially resistant to his advisers’ suggestions that he take part in mock debates with a Clinton stand-in.
.. his belief that the debates will be won or lost not on policy points and mastery of details, which are Mrs. Clinton’s strengths, but on the authenticity, boldness and leadership that the nominees demonstrate onstage.
.. her campaign is preparing ways for her to unnerve Mr. Trump and provoke him to rant and rave.
.. The Clinton camp believes that Mr. Trump is most insecure about his intelligence, his net worth and his image as a successful businessman, and those are the areas they are working with Mrs. Clinton to target.
.. Mr. Trump would be vulnerable if Mrs. Clinton proved to be calm, deliberate and relentless in attacking Mr. Trump’s character, volatility and readiness to be commander in chief.
.. “Trump has severe attention problems and simply cannot take in complex information — he will be unable to practice for these debates,”
.. “Trump will bring nothing but his bluster to the debates. He’ll use sixth-grade language, he will repeat himself many times, he won’t complete sentences, and he won’t say anything of substance.”
.. “She is more wonk than pol, so she might be especially frustrated by a steady stream of invective, conspiracy theories and lies.”
.. He said his daughter Ivanka could end up playing Mrs. Clinton.