"If you put Donald Trump behind the steering wheel of the American economy he would be very likely to drive us off a cliff," said a Hillary Clinton adviser. | Getty Clinton plans to rip Trump on economy

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Broadly speaking, polls show Americans think that Donald Trump would be a pretty solid steward of the economy.

Hillary Clinton is planning to light that notion on fire.


In a strike at the presumptive GOP nominee at one of the most politically vulnerable points of his campaign, Clinton is set Tuesday to use Trump’s public policy pronouncements and private business record to paint him as too dangerous to oversee the American economy.

The address here in Ohio's capital is intended to serve as a sequel to her early June anti-Trump speech on national security. The Clinton campaign is hoping it will garner the kind of glowing reaction from Democrats that greeted the former secretary of state after the San Diego speech that was widely seen as kicking off the strongest stretch of her campaign — and sparking a broader questioning of Trump’s credentials for the White House.

“The core proposition of her speech in Ohio is if you put Donald Trump behind the steering wheel of the American economy he would be very likely to drive us off a cliff, and working families would bear the brunt,” said Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s senior policy advisor, previewing the speech to POLITICO on Monday evening. “This is not just a supposition or assertion. This is the natural conclusion you reach when you look at the combination of his policy proposals, his reckless and erratic temperament, and his record in the private sector of consistently doing harm."

Clinton has long insisted that the economy does better under Democratic presidents than Republicans in her stump speech, but her argument on Tuesday is expected to go beyond that standard warning, mirroring the kind of urgency she rolled out earlier this month when she cautioned that electing Trump would be a “historic mistake” and that his ideas “are not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies."

That speech was greeted with a loud sigh of relief from Democrats who were newly assured that Clinton knew how to take Trump on, and it gave Clinton a new dose of confidence to close out the primary, according to people who interacted with her over that stretch. The campaign has always wanted Clinton to do a speech about Trump’s economic proposals, said Sullivan, and the San Diego model offered insights about how to make the critiques stick.

Tuesday’s address is intended to keep Clinton’s momentum going, just as Trump’s campaign is at an inflection point: it follows one day after he switched campaign managers, and just as leading Republicans are starting to panic about his lack of financial or organizational infrastructure.

But the presumptive Democratic nominee may have a harder task in Columbus than the one she faced earlier this month.

Much of the GOP hand-wringing over Trump has been over his foreign policy and national security pronouncements, as well as his divisive domestic policy suggestions. Trump's detractors have spent less time zeroing in on his economic proposals — a Gallup survey this month showed that he actually leads Clinton by 10 points when it comes to who Americans trust on the economy, and by seven points on employment and jobs.

A CNBC poll this week — which showed the two tied in terms of who Americans think would be best for the economy — had him ahead of her as the better candidate for stocks, regulating Wall Street, dealing with the budget deficit, and large companies, even if she bested him as the better candidate for the lower and middle classes.

To combat those impressions, Clinton will delve into his public pronouncements and his own record as a businessman, Sullivan said — something she couldn’t do when it came to national security. And, pointing to a Monday report from Moody’s Analytics written by a former John McCain advisor that concludes Trump’s proposals would cause a recession and a loss of 3.5 million jobs during his first term, Sullivan said there is ample evidence to believe that Clinton should be trusted over her rival.

“We are confident that when people come to understand what he’s proposing, and how he has conducted himself in the past as a businessman, and the ways in which he has hurt a whole lot of people — working people, small business people, investors — that they will come to [that] conclusion,” he said.

“This speech could be given in any state in the union, because people everywhere could be under risk from a Donald Trump presidency,” he noted, turning to the pivotal battleground state that Clinton has visited the most in recent weeks. “But if you look at a place like Ohio, which has come through a really difficult recession, which has worked really hard to get on its feet but still has uncertainty, the last thing it needs is a pair of unsteady hands at the helm."