Her newly aggressive social media strategy aims to turn the presumptive GOP nominee’s own words against him.
After a long primary campaign in which Trump has used Twitter to pump out an endless stream of taunts at rivals and gobble up news coverage, Clinton’s campaign has rolled out a strategy in recent weeks to turn the presumptive GOP nominee’s own words against him — with some sly sarcasm and snark.
.. The Clinton campaign says it teed up that tweet hours before her speech, assuming — correctly — that Trump would take the bait. And that’s actually a strategy that Twitter advises the campaigns to follow: gaming out future events and storing up especially savvy tweets, including GIFs and video, that might match those situations.
.. “The Clinton campaign is particularly good at planning to be spontaneous,” says Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio.
.. since signing on in 2009. He has amassed 8.8 million followers — some 2 million more than Clinton, who didn’t join until 2013 — and has compiled a large body of work: about 32,000 tweets, compared with Clinton’s 5,900.
.. Trump has talked about his appreciation for Twitter as a tool to confront his critics. “For years, if somebody did bad stuff to me, I couldn’t fight back,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last year. “Now I have @realDonaldTrump and I can sort of tweet some bad stuff about them, and if people like it, it’s all over the world.”
.. Her staff, at the time, noted that she wasn’t comfortable checking messages on a desktop computer.
.. it’s increasingly trying to use the real estate mogul’s voluminous statements against him in a kind of social media jujitsu.
.. Take Trump’s now-infamous tweet showing himself and a taco bowl with the phrase “I love Hispanics!” When he later suggested that a federal judge couldn’t act fairly in a case involving Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, the Clinton campaign took to Twitter to declare: “So much for the taco bowls.”
What Hillary Imagines
We all know how good Jefferson was on freedom of speech, but he was possibly the worst sexist in the very competitive group known as the Founding Fathers.
.. Dorothy Rodham had an auspicious date of birth — June 4, 1919, the very same day the Senate passed a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. But otherwise, she had a terrible beginning. Her parents abandoned her. At 8, she was riding across the country, unaccompanied except for her younger sister, on the way to live with grandparents who didn’t want them. She went off on her own at 14, working as a housekeeper during the Depression. But she got herself through high school, was a good student and raised her own daughter to believe the sky was the limit.
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ “ Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ “
.. The liberal line during the past week has been that Clinton ought to call Trump a fraud. Her attack, when it came, ran deeper. The real, devastating charge in Clinton’s San Diego speech was that Trump does not believe in America.
.. You could measure the depth of the hit in Trump’s response. Normally so gleeful on Twitter, he sneered at her for using a teleprompter, and that was about it. Then, in a transparent effort to steal the headlines, Trump resumed his attack on the federal judge presiding over one of the lawsuits against Trump University
.. Foreign policy is natural territory for Clinton, its substance and subtleties familiar, but it also has another helpful feature: it lets her mostly avoid the tensions within modern liberalism. She doesn’t have to talk about the nineteen-ninties.
.. in California, where the main political fault lines are not between conservatism and liberalism but within liberalism itself: between the vaulting meritocracy of Silicon Valley and the poverty it obscures, between middle-class progress and environmental conservation, between minority politics and expression in a place that no longer really has a majority.
.. in Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, which last year was reported to be the national leader in average wages but also had a double-digit poverty rate.
.. It is telling that Clinton, attacked relentlessly by Sanders for giving paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, never really defended her view of capital’s role in the economy
.. Either Clinton really believes that her husband’s Administration resolved the basic problems of social design or, more likely, she is enough of a partisan that she will not publicly describe where it went wrong. One way or the other, she has a blind spot.
.. That up-and-up-and-up-again cadence that she uses when she’s promising the new jobs and infrastructure bound to come in her Administration was gone entirely.
.. she seems to have acquired an idea of her opponent and, in turn, herself: that she is the patriot in the race, and the believer.
Hillary Clinton Warns Donald Trump’s ‘Thin Skin’ Would Set Off War or Economic Crisis
Calling Mr. Trump “Donald” throughout, Mrs. Clinton sought to portray her likely rival as a petulant youngster whose temperament and penchant for combat would “take our country down a truly dangerous path.”
.. “I don’t understand Donald’s bizarre fascination with dictators and strong men who have no love for America,” Mrs. Clinton said, pointing to the praise for Mr. Trump from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un. “I will leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants,” she said.
.. But Mrs. Clinton sought to turn Mr. Trump’s prolific Twitter habit into an additional bullet point showing that he was unfit for the presidency, as she put it. She twice referred to the scene in which, as secretary of state, she advised President Obama on the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
.. (In an interview during Mrs. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Trump called her performance “terrible” and “pathetic.” He added: “I’m not thin-skinned at all. I’m the opposite of thin-skinned.”)