Clinton’s campaign has now come to celebrate when the real estate developer’s controversies appear to break through even more than usual. | AP Photo Clinton's calculated quiet as Trump controversy swirls The Democrat lets the GOP nominee take the headlines with a recording of his aggressive, egregious comments about women.

NEW YORK — There was no press release, no coordinated tweet storms, no mass circulation of the original story. Not even a fundraising email.

For hours on Friday night, in the face of Donald Trump’s latest potentially campaign-altering controversy — this time a 2005 tape revealing an extraordinarily vulgar conversation about women — Hillary Clinton’s campaign turned to a strategy it’s come to favor in its general election contest against the real estate developer: silence.


With the exception of a perfunctory tweet from the candidate’s official account declaring “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president,” while retweeting the initial tweet from the Washington Post reporter who broke the news, the Democrat’s political operation took pains to let the news develop on its own as it spread like wildfire throughout the early evening.

Only at 8:00 p.m. — four hours after the original story posted — did her campaign distribute a 1 minute and 22 second video of Trump's comments, cut together with other statements he's made about women and testimonials from some of them about his treatment of them.

Clinton herself has been off the trail all Friday, deep in New York debate prep ahead of her clash with Trump on Sunday. But her campaign made sure to keep itself in the news stream on a series of other topics throughout the day, issuing formal statements on news that the United States formally implicated Russia in election-related hacks and on the Republican nominee’s claim that he still believes the Central Park Five to be guilty — so the sudden silence on Friday afternoon was striking.

Often when Trump’s past statements and actions catch up with him, Clinton’s operatives and her surrounding groups are quick to pounce, releasing web videos, tweets, and statements. But on Friday afternoon — as cable network after cable network picked up the story, Democratic Senate candidates sought to lash their opponents to Trump, and political groups focused on women ripped into him — none came, either from Clinton’s team or her super PAC.

This tactic has become more and more popular in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.

After months of hand-wringing in the lead-up to the general election about Trump’s ability to dominate news cycles, Clinton’s campaign — which has long been focused largely on keeping suburban women from supporting their opponent — has now come to celebrate that phenomenon on occasions when the real estate developer’s controversies appear to break through even more than usual.

On Sept. 30, for example, shortly after Trump went on a late-night Twitter tirade against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, press secretary Brian Fallon wryly tweeted, “Oh look, Trump is dominating the news cycle again. Whatever will we do."

Their calculation is that weighing in would just make such stories into political back-and-forths rather than unadulterated reports on Trump’s misdeeds. The campaign is more than happy to let this story be the final piece of big news before Sunday night's debate.

While Democrats in the swing states quickly scrambled to gauge their new opportunities to further depress Trump’s numbers with women and millennials on Friday night, however, there was one peep from Clinton’s relentlessly on-message communications squad.

“Here is the sign up form to volunteer for @HillaryClinton,” wrote spokesman Jesse Ferguson, providing a link.

The tweet landed forty minutes after the story.