Donald Trump is finally doing what Republicans leaders had hoped he would the minute he clinched the GOP presidential nomination: he’s hitting Hillary Clinton where it hurts.
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For a little over a week now, Trump has kept his focus on his Democratic opponent by capitalizing on the numerous developments related to her private email practices and the questionable dealings between Clinton Foundation donors and the State Department.
Hours after State Department officials confirmed on Monday that FBI investigators had uncovered nearly 15,000 additional emails that Clinton’s attorneys had failed to disclose during their probe into her email practices, Trump called for a special prosecutor to take over the case.
“After the FBI and Department of Justice whitewashed Hillary Clinton’s email crimes, they certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton’s new crimes,” he said at a rally in battleground Ohio. “The Justice Department is required to appoint an independent Special Prosecutor because it has proven itself to be really, sadly a political arm of the White House.”
Three days later, at a campaign stop in Tampa, Fla., Trump demanded that federal lawmakers “act immediately” to determine whether Clinton perjured herself during congressional testimony about her emails. He simultaneously urged Congressional Republicans to put pressure on the FBI and Justice Department to launch a public corruption probe into the Clinton Foundation.
“It’s impossible to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” said the Republican presidential nominee.
Having watched Trump’s objective evolve from making himself the center of attention to shining a spotlight on Clinton, veteran GOP strategist Ford O’Connell said the candidate must have come to understand that the latter will give him a far better shot at victory in November.
“I think he came to the realization that the only way he could win this election is if it becomes a referendum on Clinton and her scandals,” O’Connell told the Washington Examiner.
But Trump hasn’t limited his attacks against Clinton to the scandals that have long cast a shadow on her candidacy. During a rally Thursday in Manchester, N.H., he went on the offensive and shamed the former secretary of state ahead of a speech in which she planned to brand him and his supporters as prejudiced.
“The news reports are that Hillary Clinton is going to try to accuse this campaign, and the millions of decent Americans who support this campaign, of being racists,” he warned the crowd. “It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook [and] the same old disgusting argument.”
Before Thursday, Trump had spent a solid week hitting Clinton over her scandals and accusing her of seeing minorities only as votes. He ratcheted up his attacks immediately after her campaign released an ad on Thursday morning that linked him and his supporters to neo-nazi groups and the Klu Klux Klan.
“To Hillary Clinton, and to her donors and advisers, pushing her to spread her smears and her lies about decent people, I have three words,” Trump said in the Granite State. “I want you to hear these words and remember these words: shame on you.”
Furthermore, despite his own strained relationship with the press, Trump has actively sought to peg Clinton as a candidate with zero interest in transparency by routinely highlighting her refusal to hold a press conference for more than 250 days.
“As all of these revelations have been discovered — some this week, many this month — Hillary Clinton has been hiding,” he said Thursday, one day after his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, made a similar comment during an interview on Fox News.
Trump’s laser-like focus on Clinton has been the wish of down-ballot candidates and GOP strategists for months, and comes just before Labor Day when some Republicans believe a tightening of national and state-level polls could occur.
Already, he has earned the praise of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who just last month was said to be considering a suspension of party resources toward Trump’s campaign.
The party chief told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last Sunday that Trump has “shown maturity as a candidate” by agreeing to use a teleprompter at his campaign rallies, offering legitimate critiques of his opponent and making direct appeals to minority voters.
“He’s had a great week,” Priebus said. “I think he’s getting into a groove — he likes the new style that he’s been producing out on the campaign trail.”
But the question is whether Trump has made a permanent pivot or soon resorts to his old habits of leveling personal insults against pundits, politicians and members of the press and wandering off topic at his rallies.
“I think there is a little bit of reluctance among Republicans to immediately commend him,” O’Connell said. “But because they’re inextricably linked to him, whether they like it or not they basically have all the interest in the world to convince him to stay on message and applaud him when he does.”
