Hillary Clinton, until today, had sharply limited her interactions with the national press pack, seeking out local outlets or softer formats like "Ellen." | Getty Clinton celebrates with Trump-like media spree

A day after becoming the first woman to claim a major political party’s presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton on Wednesday took a page from Donald Trump’s book.

It involved a lot of talking.


The now-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee blitzed the media Wednesday, phoning four major newspapers for exclusive 10-minute interviews and granting additional sit-downs with five major television networks — including a rare appearance on Fox News.

Clinton and Trump will likely be crowned their party’s nominee at their respective conventions in July, setting up a high-stakes clash between two vastly different candidates with two vastly different approaches to the press.

Trump, a reality star weaned on New York's hothouse tabloid culture, has dominated the media landscape throughout his unorthodox campaign, generating obsessive TV coverage of his often bombastic and off-the-cuff remarks.

But the billionaire businessman has also granted the media unprecedented access, often holding press conferences at Trump-branded establishments and taking questions from reporters, in addition to frequent phone interviews and sit-downs with networks and individual journalists. Even as he bashes the media as "scum" and "despicable people," his bare-bones campaign has relied on his ability to dominate the news cycle to blot out his rivals' messages. By the New York Times' count, as of March he'd already earned some $2 billion worth of free media.

Clinton, until today, had sharply limited her interactions with the national press pack, seeking out local outlets or softer formats like "Ellen." Her sudden accessibility comes after she went more than six months without holding a news conference, though she has held 10 short gaggles with reporters in 2016.

During Wednesday's interviews, she reveled in the historic nature of her nomination but also stayed on the offensive against Trump and called for unity in the Democratic Party to maintain control of the White House.

U.S. elections are “probably the most challenging in the world,” Clinton told the New York Times.

She was “absolutely stunned by the level of excitement and the incredible enthusiasm” her supporters showed Tuesday night, she told the Washington Post, confessing her worry that "when I went out to speak, just the emotion of the moment would be so intense that I might have trouble getting through the speech itself.”

As for Trump, he's a dangerous demagogue with a “very apparent lack of qualifications to be president,” she told the Post. “He has no real answers. He has slogans.”

For the Wall Street Journal, she previewed a major economic speech she plans to deliver this month railing against Trump’s policies, similar in tone to the blistering remarks she gave in San Diego over Trump’s foreign policy.

“It’s not hard to see how a Trump presidency could actually lead to a serious global economic crisis,” she said.

Speaking with NBC’s Lester Holt, Clinton described what Trump's vanquished rivals had taught her about how not to take him on.

“Well, I think that there are several lessons from his primary race. No. 1, a lot of his primary opponents never took him on over issues, because they were somewhat close to what he was saying,” Clinton told Holt. “And when it came to the personal attacks, because they didn't have any strong issue position to contrast with him they really couldn't come back on the personal side, either.”

On Fox, she fended off questions over investigations into her private email server during her tenure as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation, telling host Bret Baier there’s “absolutely” no chance that such investigations are problematic for her campaign and dismissing any chance of a federal indictment.

“Well, I will repeat what I said: That is not going to happen,” she said. “There is no basis for it and I’m looking forward to this being wrapped up as soon as possible.”