Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lit Donald Trump's fuse Thursday night, and now it's only a matter of time before we get a full-on Trump eruption in response.

This will, presumably, be exactly as she intended it. One of the smartest parts of her acceptance speech was a trap she laid in framing him as thin-skinned and temperamentally unfit for the presidency. He's going to take the bit and prove her right. He can't help himself.

"Ask yourself: Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be the commander-in-chief?" Clinton said Thursday night. "Donald Trump can't even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he's gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he's challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."

This, to quote the renowned military strategist Gial Ackbar, is a trap. She's baiting him, daring him to lash out and prove that he really is easily led into losing his cool.

And he's going to dive into that trap because he can't help himself. He's proven over and over again that he lacks the self-discipline and impulse control necessary to ignore slights and stay focused on the end-goal. As I wrote back in June, Trump's staff can't hope to stop him, only to contain him – they might be able to keep him bottled up and buttoned down for a few days but inevitably he'll slip his leash and start foaming at the mouth like a mad dog.

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He's provided a classic example just this week. Speaking at a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa, Thursday night, Trump complained about how mean speakers at the Democratic convention had been. "I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard," he said. "I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard their heads would spin, they'd never recover – and that's what I did with a lot of – that's why I still don't have certain people endorsing me, they still haven't recovered, OK?" He relayed how a "highly respected governor" (would that be Mike Pence or Chris Christie?) called him and talked him down from doing it.

Consider one week ago, at Trump's first post-convention appearance, the morning after his acceptance speech. Appearing at a rally to thank volunteers, Trump went off on a genuinely weird rant against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in which, among other things, he aired yet again the theory that Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination, wondered why The National Inquirer hasn't gotten a Pulitzer Prize and insisted that he wouldn't accept the Lone Star legislator's endorsement even if proffered – forgetting the lesson of "Hamlet" about what protesting too much really means. It was his first general election appearance but he spent it stewing over wounds of a primary races that had ended months earlier.

Or consider one Trump's most memorable moments from the primaries, his QVC news conference in which he hawked and defended (mendaciously, no surprise) his various branded items, from steak to vodka and so forth. That performance had been spurred by a speech the previous week in which 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney had eviscerated the various items in the Trump branding constellation. Romney's speech had gotten little traction and was already old news by the time Trump instructed his campaign to assemble his wares for display. "This wasn't impromptu – he consciously decided to interrupt his regularly scheduled impersonation of a president in order to very unpresidentially hawk his wares, because he couldn't stand that someone had questioned his brand," I wrote at the time. "So thank you Mitt Romney, for getting inside The Donald's head. I imagine it's a terrifying place to be, but you have blazed a trail for others to follow."

The lesson from that experience was that Trump has easily pressed buttons. And Tuesday night Clinton pressed them and you can imagine that she'll continue to press them for the next three months.

This is the genius of her trap: Every time he lashes out he'll only be reinforcing her central charge, that he doesn't have the temperament for the job.

As commentator Robert George (a corporate colleague as he is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, which like U.S. News is owned by Mort Zuckerman) noted after the speech:

What you want to do in successful political speech: Create frame that opponent keeps confirming. https://t.co/4gCuSmuIhC — Robert A George (@RobGeorge) July 29, 2016