Here’s What Hillary Clinton Learned From Trump’s GOP Rivals

In the GOP primaries, Donald Trump’s opponents made every mistake they could possibly make when it came to how they dealt with him. First they largely ignored him and treated him like a novelty act. When that didn’t work, they tried going toe-to-toe with him and trading insults. That didn’t work well, either, and in the matter of a couple of months Trump was the front-runner and is now the presumptive Republican nominee.

But as it already clear, Hillary Clinton will not be making those mistakes as she begins to define and attack Trump.

This week, Clinton once again made a direct frontal assault on Trump, saying he would be a disaster for the economy and getting in one of the best criticisms yet in the 2016 campaign:

“A few days ago, he said, ‘I’m going to do for the country what I did for my business.’ So let’s take a look at what he has done. He’s written a lot of books about business — they all seem to end at Chapter 11.”

And in the past couple of weeks, Clinton–along with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Elizabeth Warren–have been firing numerous verbal jabs at Trump, who must feel like he’s under a steady barrage from Democrats of all stripes. And it’s exactly what Trump’s GOP rivals could never seem to manage, probably because they were too busy trying to knock each other out of contention. Clinton doesn’t have that dilemma.

It should be noted that over the past month or so, Trump has been quite adept at shooting himself in the foot with his comments about the Mexican heritage of the judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case and the ridiculous statements he made after the massacre in Orlando.

Also, Clinton knows something else that is a great weakness of Trump’s, perhaps the Achilles heel which will ultimately bring him down: He has no real campaign infrastructure, no legions of volunteers who will go out and knock on doors for him or organize voter registration drives. And she also knows this: Trump is the star of his campaign. There are no supporting players, and even when he names a running mate, that person is likely to get lost in the attention being paid to Trump.

But by far the most important thing Clinton has in her favor is that Trump is so massively disliked by nearly everyone. Granted, her own unfavorable numbers are high, but they aren’t 70 percent the way Trump’s are with one of the most important voting blocs, women. He also does poorly among blacks and Hispanics, millennials, and the college educated. That doesn’t leave him any room for error. And he constantly makes errors.

None of this is to say the election will be a walk in the park for Clinton, but she clearly has a game plan for how you beat a person like Donald Trump: You do the opposite of what those who lost to him did.

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