For Clinton, Trump is theoretically a useful character – a cartoonish embodiment of Republicans’ unfitness to govern. In reality he’s too big, too loud and too cutting for anybody to ignore. | AP Photo Off Message 5 ways Donald Trump is driving Hillary Clinton crazy Beating up Bill, dominating the press, and certainly having more fun.

Donald Trump might not make it to the general election against Hillary Clinton (she’s no lock either) but increasingly he’s deciding to forego the usual, mirthless flogging of his fellow Republicans to turn his vitriol on the far more formidable Democratic frontrunner.

Trump, blessed with more raw political cunning than any 2016 contender (including Clinton) hasn’t yet won a single contest, but he’s got good reason to pretend it’s already down to just the Democrat and him. That strategy allows him to talk past his Republican opponents, legitimizes him as his party’s frontrunner, gives him pushback against the argument he’d get creamed in a general election, and lets him dry-erase the fact that he flirted with not-so-conservative politics and the Clinton Clan.


For Clinton, Trump is theoretically a useful character – a cartoonish embodiment of Republicans’ unfitness to govern. In reality he’s too big, too loud and too cutting for anybody to ignore.

With that in mind, here are five ways the tawny-thatched GOP frontrunner is messing up the best-laid plans of his buttoned-down Democratic counterpart.

1. He’s going there on Bill Clinton. As my colleague Annie Karni wrote a couple of weeks back, Hillary Clinton – fiercely protective of her husband’s legacy – is finally chill enough to joke about Bill Clinton after two decades of scandal, sturm and drang. Trump is putting them on the defensive again.

The Clinton team decided to deploy the man they call the “Big Dog” after New Year’s in part to counter Trump. The reality star – sensing the threat -- dove into a dumpster that Clinton’s opponents have been reluctant to delve, the former president’s 1980s- and 1990s-vintage sex scandals. “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women's card on me, she's wrong!" Trump tweeted on Dec. 28. This week he produced a snazzy little Instagram featuring Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby and Anthony Weiner – a not-so subtle linkage to (alleged) pervs.

Never mind the hypocritical whiff: Trump’s campaign howled for mercy when a reporter dredged up old allegations of rape allegedly leveled by his first wife – or that he had until fairly recently been buddies with Bubba. The attack generated plenty of agita in Brooklyn, distracting from what was supposed to be a gentle Bill rollout that emphasized his grandfather-liness and his role as well-behaved, vegan elder statesman.

Tactically, the Trump attack upstaged Clinton’s debut – but the former president, however older and mellower, is no Jeb Bush. He knows how to throw a punch, and has hinted there will be a day of reckoning for his old pal Donald.

2. He’s beating the same media that’s beating her up. Clinton’s inability to master the press – or even understand the basic rules of controlling bad coverage – is legendary. As first lady, Clinton’s suspicion of the prying media hardened into a trench warfare determination to keep reporters at arms’ length; There have been periods of thaw but her personal press relations were abysmal in 2008 and have been more or less non-existent in the 2016 cycle.

She was inexplicably ill-prepared and defensive in dealing with the predictable onslaught after the email scandal. And she hasn’t been willing to engage in all but the bare minimum off-the-record shmooze sessions that build goodwill – or at least mutual understanding – with her embedded press contingent. Many of the reporters who cover her have little sense of connection (positive or negative) to the candidate they have co-habitated with for months, and it’s clear that her chilly diffidence is a personal choice.

By contrast, Trump is an engaged ogre. From earliest days as a Gotham tabloid darling, Trump has embraced the need to directly and forcefully engage with the people who cover him. It’s an often ugly and confrontational relationship, but one that has worked to his decisive advantage: He hectors his press contingent and personalizes conflict (in a repulsive episode late last year, mocked the physical disability of a New York Times reporter) but they seldom leave without a headline. Trump campaign reporters are often singled out for abuse at his rallies, but they occupy a central space in his campaign, and he deals with them directly without a screen of press staff.

And unlike Clinton, he often schmoozes with reporters -- even after calling them “disgusting” or “unfair” a day or two earlier.

3. He’s fun. Hillary Clinton is a broccoli politician – Donald Trump is an all-you-can-eat donut truck.

Clinton’s support is deeper and (probably) more durable, but the respective size and passion of their crowds speak to her vulnerabilities, if not necessarily his electability. Clinton events are predictable, stodgy, policy-lecture pep rallies designed to bond her to the constituencies she must galvanize to win. Trump’s rallies are gut-punch populist rambles through his id punctuated by the raucous ejection of pop-up protesters that break out with the approximate frequency of minor-league hockey fights.

After a third group of pro-immigrant protesters were removed – to the delighted howls of 7,000 in Lowell, Mass. earlier this week -- he stepped back from the podium with closed-mouth jowly grin to declare: “Isn't this more fun than a regular, boring rally?”

It sure was – and Hillary Clinton has never had occasion to ask one of her crowds the same question.

4. He’s dumbing everything down. As a candidate, Hillary Clinton campaigns with detached dignity and caution of a 1960’s or 1970's politician, and her passion, unmistakably, is policy. Clinton’s kick-off speech at Roosevelt Island this summer was a nearly interminable laundry list of proposals ranging from Wall St. reform to childcare to ISIS. Trump’s appeal, by contrast, is visceral and enthusiastically anti-intellectual. The policy page on his web site has been blank for most of the campaign – and his maiden speech as a candidate consisted of a free-association riff in the lobby of his building that included his now infamous Mexicans-are-rapists riff and his pledge to build a big wall on the border.

More importantly, he seems to be changing the expectations of some (perhaps many) voters and reporters: Substance is becoming a condiment, bombast the main course, and Clinton despises that to her wonky core. “She has a certain view of what the process is supposed to be, and she thinks – apart from everything else – that he’s destroying that,” one longtime Clinton adviser told me.

5. He's a yooge distraction. Both Clintons view Trump’s presence as a positive, and see him as an ultimately unacceptable candidate who will drive all but his hardcore fans away from the eventual Republican nominee. Clinton’s veteran press staff thinks the key to beating Trump is to marginalize him – by refusing to bite every bit of bait he dangles – the better to concentrate on an unexpectedly stout primary threat from Bernie Sanders.

So far Clinton and her oft-hot-headed husband have tried to play it as cool as possible with Trump. “I've adopted a New Year's resolution,” Clinton said during one of her first Iowa events of 2016. “I'm going to let him live in his alternate reality. I'm not going to respond.”

But Hillary Clinton is an intensely competitive – and sometimes paranoid – politician who has always browbeat her staff when they didn’t rush to defend her from attacks. And one of the prime Clinton directives from the early 1990’s “War Room” days is not allowing any attack to go unanswered. With Trump spewing out new accusations and insults by the hour that could be a time- and resource-consuming business.

