Donald Trump’s team is hunkering down to draft the charge sheet the presumptive GOP nominee will unveil against Hillary Clinton on Monday, intent on laying out a credible general election argument that leads voters to question her trustworthiness.

Senior campaign advisers beginning to focus on the speech cast it Wednesday as “all about pivoting to the general election.”


But many Republicans worry that the former reality TV star’s penchant for focusing on the Clintons’ personal lives and scandals of years past — he declared them “fair game” months ago as he bulldozed to the finish line of a Republican primary — could undermine the more disciplined case party leaders have been making against Clinton for a year — that the Democrat’s email controversy and actions in Benghazi show she is too irresponsible to be commander in chief.

“If you want to talk about issues of character, you can talk about infidelity and the corruption scandals, but there are more here-and-now things, more contemporary to what we’re now discussing, that are where he’s going to focus,” said John Jay LaValle, a Trump surrogate and the GOP chairman of Suffolk County, New York.

“If Mr. Trump stays focused on issues like Benghazi, the email scandal and to the extent that she was so willing to compromise national security, he’ll be able to make a credible case that she’s the one who would put the country in danger as commander in chief,” LaValle continued.

Trump has had the advantage of nearly a month to pivot to Clinton. But it wasn’t until the past week of intense criticism over Trump’s racially charged attacks on a federal judge that party leadership and establishment Republicans pushed their presumptive nominee to focus his efforts on crafting a cohesive and compelling argument against his opponent.

Trump attempted to do just that on Tuesday night, sticking to more recent Clinton controversies, apparently heeding the advice of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who encouraged him to adopt a more coherent message that lined up neatly with GOP messaging. Reading a scripted speech from a teleprompter, the real-estate mogul, whom Clinton has cast as avaricious and ego-driven, argued that it’s the Clintons who have wrongly cashed in on their three decades in public life.

“The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves,” Trump said. “They've made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund,” he continued.

If Trump follows the contours of that attack and avoids the brash declarations about Clinton’s gender — his remark that “if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she would get 5 percent of the vote” drew a visible eyeroll from Chris Christie’s wife during a late April news conference at Trump Tower — he could go a long way toward allaying the establishment’s concerns about his tendency to delve into conspiracy theories and personal attacks.

But Trump’s promise to deliver a speech about “all the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” never mind a yearlong campaign replete with impolitic, off-the-cuff statements, unnerves some in the establishment.

“It needs to be credible. He can’t give a ‘four Pinocchios’ tin-foil hat speech,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist in Washington. “If he’s going to disqualify her, the evidence that supports his case has to be legitimate. It can’t be the musings, whims and wannabes of the conspiracy illuminati. The good news for Trump is there is more than enough credible evidence out there to organize and demonstrate why she should never be president.”

As Trump’s inner circle begins to deliberate on what to say, the more salacious, headline-worthy attacks against Clinton, however dated, are never far from the candidate’s mind. And he’s already drawn on some of the most sordid allegations against the Clintons.

Just two weeks ago, Trump released a video that featured an image of Bill Clinton chomping on a cigar, along with audio recordings of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick recounting allegations that they were sexually assaulted by the former president. And just last month, Trump’s campaign requested RNC research on the 1990s investigation into Whitewater, the Clintons’ failed 1980s-era real estate investment.

“Trump’s advisers believe Hillary has three major vulnerabilities,” a Trump insider said Wednesday, referring to alleged “epic corruption of the Clinton Foundation” and exorbitant speaking fees, which the source dismissed as “payoffs and bribes”; Clinton’s tenure at the State Department and lingering questions about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya; her use of a private email server; the nexus between the State Department and the foundation; and Clinton’s efforts to “discredit and intimidate” women who might have been involved with her husband.

This biggest proponent of using allegations about Bill Clinton is longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, whose recent book about the Clintons details a number of alleged affairs that Stone says the Clintons covered up. The book could provide a trove of material, however controversial, if Trump opts to go down this road.

The campaign would not comment on the record. But one campaign source made a point of clarifying that Stone “has nothing to do with this whatsoever. Roger has zero involvement in this campaign. He is tied to a super PAC, so by law we have nothing to do with him.”

Anti-Trump forces say Trump has a narrow window — perhaps a week — to prove he can shed his irascible and petty behavior if he wants to squelch a re-energized movement to sideline him as the Republican nominee. Though such an effort is still considered a long shot, a failure to silence it could indicate he’s still struggling to unite wary conservatives behind his presidential bid.

As of Wednesday, Trump had yet to nail down the location for the speech scheduled for Monday, although during an interview he expressed interest in holding it at his golf course along the Potomac River just outside Washington, D.C.

If the speech occurs Monday, it would come 11 days after Clinton’s point-by-point takedown of Trump in a San Diego speech that reframed the general election in stark terms as she argued that Trump is “temperamentally unfit” to serve as commander in chief.

Trump’s immediate reaction consisted of calling Hillary Clinton “pathetic” in a few tweets and during rallies but little coordinated response, as few Republicans rose to his defense and campaign surrogates did little to change the narrative. Some campaign staffers and Trump supporters are concerned about the lean operation’s slow and sometimes disjointed response operation and ongoing failure to hire more staff.

“It really shouldn’t take two weeks to formulate a response,” said an operative working with the Trump campaign.

Ben Schreckinger and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.