Hillary Clinton’s advisers have one big warning for her as she prepares to run against Donald Trump: Don’t get trampled like Jeb Bush.

Top operatives in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters have studied closely the various strategies deployed by the Republicans felled by Trump — including that of the former Florida governor, whose passivity in the face of Trump’s taunts and insults doomed his once-inevitable seeming campaign. They also took notes as Sen. Marco Rubio tried and failed to match Trump in an unflattering game of personal insults.


"She will not be passive, like we saw from so many of the Republicans he vanquished," said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. "But she will also not follow him into the gutter. She can challenge him in the way the Republicans wouldn't — on the issues and on his hateful rhetoric."

Clinton officials believe the Democratic front-runner — who leads Trump in national polls by about 10 points — has an edge over the 16 Republicans slayed by the real estate developer in that she can challenge him aggressively on policy and ignore the personal attacks. The Republicans foundered, Clinton told CNN in an interview Wednesday, because “they didn't take him on on the issues because they agreed with him and they didn't know how to counterpunch."

But Trump adviser Roger Stone shrugged at the Clinton game plan to attack Trump while taking the high road. “Who’s defining what’s a personal attack? It’s an affront when you raise issues she doesn’t want to go into," Stone said of the Clinton strategy, ticking off areas on which he plans to attack her, including her husband's sex scandals of the 1990s and her behavior toward the women involved. “The finances of the [Clinton] Foundation are a blueprint of self-dealing at a minimum," he added.

Nonetheless, some Clinton allies say heeding the lessons of the ill-fated Republican field, and avoiding the inherent pitfalls of running against a candidate who is constantly and even outrageously on the attack, aren’t the same thing.

For most of 2016, Hillary Clinton’s advisers were divided into two camps about whom they wanted to run against. One faction of her Brooklyn-based operation touted Ted Cruz as the ultimate opponent — a conventional, and widely disliked, candidate who would have made the day-to-day of the general election a more predictable clash between Clinton’s center-left politics and an unusually right-wing nominee. They also predicted that a battle against Cruz would be less ugly than one with Trump. A second group has been hoping for Trump to emerge from the GOP confusion, spoiling for a fight against a candidate who might be unpredictable but has higher negatives than any politician in public life.

But one of the drawbacks of running against Trump, Clinton allies said, is how a woman who struggles to be spontaneous on the campaign trail will fare against a Republican nominee with zero impulse control.

Trump wins at rapid response because he doesn’t convene a conference call of advisers before offering his opinion about an opponent or events in the world: He does the responding off the cuff, by himself, the only candidate operating at the high speed of social media. He’s also extremely comfortable in the give and take of news conferences, which Clinton studiously avoids.

Compared to Trump’s free-floating approach, Clinton's campaign is cautious by design, bogged down with multiple layers of approvals before issuing any statement or even tweet from the campaign. "Trump can go anywhere, the guy's relentless and a brawler," said Stone. "She's so poll-tested. She's calling him a 'loose cannon.' Did that test better than 'right-wing extremist'? It's so ridiculously canned, while Trump is a free spirit."

Democratic allies and donors said they are worried about how Clinton, who wants to battle Trump aggressively, will keep up. They also fear complacency among Democrats who view Trump as someone who can't build a winning coalition — especially because Clinton looks so dominant in national and battleground state polls, and the Electoral College map appears daunting for Trump.

For months, Clinton and her allies have been pointing out that a candidate who struggles to consolidate support in his own party has a rough path to building the coalition of voters needed to win a general election — especially after he has alienated Latino and female voters. There’s also been a focus on Trump’s historically and consistently high negatives, and extreme unpopularity among independent and Democratic voters.

The fear now is that Democrats are taking too much for granted in a November contest that almost all of them expect to win.

“There is some complacency and this disbelief that America could elect this guy,” said Clinton donor Jay Jacobs. “People who think that way are too immersed in their own existence. I don't think they've been out in the country, in other economic stations in life. There are a lot of people during the French Revolution who were surprised to find themselves in the carts rolling down to the guillotine.”

But Clinton-backing elected officials said deep down they do not believe Trump can beat Clinton. “Ohio is a reasonable state,” said Rep. Tim Ryan of the battleground state he represents. “Donald Trump is a very unreasonable man. I’m really confident that if we execute the message — that this guy would gut the finances of working-class families, and provide more nuclear weapons in the world so that ISIS could potentially get them — that doesn't make any sense to someone in Ohio.”

But the feeling that he can’t win because the country will be reasonable is what worries Clinton allies. "He's a joke that we have to take seriously," said pollster Jefrey Pollock, who works for Priorities USA, the super PAC backing Clinton. "All Democrats should fear complacency where the stakes are so high that electing him would be a tragedy."

In interviews with a dozen Clinton allies, many said they are more worried about voters taking for granted her upcoming victory than about the tsunami of personal attacks Trump will launch against Clinton and her husband. Those attacks, they believe, are already baked into the Clinton cake.

“Complacency could elect Donald Trump,” said longtime Clinton donor Ken Sunshine. “To win, we're going to have to raise a lot of money, and every one of those people who arrogantly tells me 'It's in the bag, he's an idiot,' could elect Trump if their complacency rules out and they don't contribute. It's not in the bag."

Clinton campaign officials said they expect a race against Trump to remain tight until the end — and have responded by starting to build an organization in key battleground states to address early voting, which starts in September. However, the challenge of Trump — taking him seriously as a threat when so many Clinton allies simply cannot grasp his appeal — remains.

“If we execute the game plan, and we stay focused,” Ryan said, “she will be the president. Because at the end of the day, he’s an entertainer, and when the pressure’s on, he’s a head case.”