2016 Clinton casts Trump aside With two weeks to go, the Democrat will focus on the Senate and hope Trump keeps himself in the headlines.

For the two days leading up to the final debate showdown in Las Vegas, Donald Trump was driving a message that was unnerving some on Hillary Clinton’s campaign team.

Instead of threatening to bring forward new Bill Clinton allegations or mimicking Hillary Clinton falling down, Trump seemed to be honing a plausible message for a candidate running as a populist outsider: draining the swamp of Washington, D.C., and advocating for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Congress.


Here was the Trump that Clinton feared much more than one who went “scorched-earth” — the toned-down, issues-oriented version of the candidate who managed to tighten the race to a dead heat between mid-August and mid-September. Then Trump stepped onto the debate stage at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Wednesday evening — and didn't mention those political reform plans once.

For Clinton’s top aides, that moment encapsulated the dilemma that was Trump: the gap between the campaign-coached nominee who should have shown up and the instinct-reliant one who did. And it was how Clinton managed to dominate the three debates, and, in some ways, the entire election cycle: by baiting her opponent so that he never stopped being Trump.

Now, as the candidates head into the final 15 days of the 2016 presidential election, Clinton’s plan is to keep goading Trump from afar while trying to deliver a positive closing statement to voters that will make her likely election about something more than a simple rejection of Trumpism.

She spent the weekend dismissing Trump — “I don’t even think about responding to him anymore,” she said Saturday, turning her attention to down-ballot races that she hopes will go Democratic and deliver congressional margins that might allow her to see some of her priorities become law. And on Monday, she campaigns with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of Trump’s fiercest tormentors, in New Hampshire — an opportunity to prod the Republican nominee while elevating Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan in her Senate race against incumbent Kelly Ayotte. (Hassan's race is one of six that could ultimately determine control of the Senate, and Ayotte has nose-dived in the polls after saying during a debate that Trump was “absolutely” a role model. She later tried to walk back the comment.)

Throughout the general election campaign, Clinton operatives have expressed anxiety over what might go wrong — and it usually had to do less with Clinton blowing it than with Trump simply shutting up. They have fretted that a Trump Tower staffer might change the password on the boss' Twitter account, or that the Republican nominee would somehow stay on the teleprompter for long enough to stop creating new content for Clinton’s ad makers and opposition research team.

In television commercials and on the debate stage, Clinton’s most effective contrasts and attacks have been to simply repeat Trump’s own words back to him, or to air raw footage of Trump speaking. “Donald Trump has been a victim of self-inflicted wounds throughout this campaign,” said Clinton’s senior strategist, Joel Benenson.

The third debate was where Clinton used her tactics to finish him and move onto this final phase of the race. “A lot of people may have expected her to go into the final debate playing it safe, but she didn't,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. “She used it to make her closing argument and begin putting him away.”

Clinton’s strategy throughout all three high-stakes debates was to unmask the “real” Trump by leading him unsuspectingly into rabbit holes where he would attack and sputter — and ultimately forget what he actually needed to do, which was to continue driving a consistent, outsider message without the aid of a teleprompter.

In mock debate sessions, Clinton’s Trump stand-in, longtime aide Philippe Reines, yelled “wrong” into the microphone and interrupted his boss so she could practice delivering her lines unperturbed. And for three consecutive debates, Clinton came armed with lines and characters designed to bait Trump — in two debates, she mentioned beauty queen-turned-“eating machine” Alicia Machado; and twice she needled him with an effective Freudian dig about Trump’s wealthy, self-made father setting him up for life.

But a much larger part of Clinton’s debate strategy, according to insiders, was to avoid addressing Trump directly on the debate stage. It was a lesson her prep team gleaned from watching the Republican primary debates, where every candidate who came at Trump head-on ultimately lost. Trump was good at bombing from a distance, or stabbing from up close. But at a sword-match distance, Clinton aides concluded Trump was less skilled at parrying attacks.

In hours of prep sessions at the Doral Arrowwood resort near her Chappaqua home, Clinton practiced avoiding the pronoun “you." Instead, she addressed her rival almost entirely in the third person, her comments directed at the moderator, or the undecided voters in the town hall.

Democrats outside the campaign worried ahead of the debates that Clinton would get bogged down in dry policy details in the debates, failing to show a warmer side they felt voters needed to see.

But her debate prep team devised a strategy that allowed Clinton to stay within her comfort zone, wearing armor made of five-point policy proposals — whether or not voters were ingesting all of her plans didn’t matter as much as the overall contrast those ideas helped create between her depth and the revelation of Trump’s shallowness.

Reines, in these practices, showed Clinton what one aide described as “a lot of different looks” to prepare for how unpredictable Trump could be. But one thing turned out to be entirely predictable — he always took the bait.

“Such a nasty woman,” Trump grumbled into the mic Wednesday night after Clinton remarked that Trump's Social Security payroll contribution would go up under her plan, "assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it."

It was exactly where she needed him: far from the more effective #DrainTheSwamp message, hurling personal insults instead. And it helps that Clinton is at her most winning when she shows off her steely resistance under fire — a mode that is more natural to her than trying to play the empath in front of an audience of millions.

“It was a shorter version of the Benghazi hearing,” spokeswoman Christina Reynolds said of Clinton’s debate performances overall. “It wasn’t 11 hours, but he called her a ‘nasty woman,’ and she was unflappable. She cannot be flapped.”

Asked about the "nasty woman" epithet as she boarded her campaign plane back to New York, post-debate, Clinton demurred, staying above the fray. “I just didn’t pay any attention to that,” she said.