TYPICALLY, when politicians attack rivals in campaign speeches, they must distort their opponents’ words for maximum effect, or at least wrench them out of context. When Hillary Clinton used a foreign-policy address on June 2nd to savage Donald Trump as a man unfit to be commander-in-chief, her speech gained much of its power by quoting the businessman’s boorish inanities more or less verbatim. Striking a tone that mixed derision with indignation and disbelief, Mrs Clinton reminded an audience in San Diego that Mr Trump “says he has foreign-policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.” As a point of pure fact, Mrs Clinton is right. Explaining his understanding of Russia in an interview with the Fox News Channel on May 5th, Mr Trump—the presumptive presidential nominee of the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—declared: “I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, Miss Universe contest, which was a big, big, incredible event.”

“This is a man who said more countries should have nuclear weapons, including Saudi Arabia,” charged the Democratic front-runner, who was fierier and more energetic than she has seemed in a long time. There, the fact-checkers might stumble a little. Mr Trump has offered many thoughts on nuclear proliferation in recent months, some of them straightforwardly alarming, and some of them resembling what some prose-stylists refer to as a “word salad” of incoherence.

Because nuclear proliferation is really quite important, and to make quite clear Mr Trump’s lack of clarity on the subject, here is a bit of an interview with CNN to which Mrs Clinton was referring, from March. Reminded by the host, Anderson Cooper, that it is American policy to oppose new members of the nuclear club, Mr Trump responded: “Maybe it’s going to be time to change, because so many people, you have Pakistan has it, you have China have it, you have so many other countries [with the Bomb].” Then, a moment later, he went on: “Wouldn’t you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?” Asked in the same CNN interview if Saudi Arabia should have nuclear arms, Mr Trump responded, at first: “Saudi Arabia? Absolutely”, and then “no, not nuclear weapons,” and then finally, “Can I be honest with you? It’s going to happen, anyway.”

The crowd in San Diego roared “No” like the audience at a Christmas pantomime when Mrs Clinton bundled all of that into a single rhetorical question: “Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?”

It was a neat punchline, but in the real world this is not a joke. On June 1st the official newspaper of the North Korean ruling Worker’s Party praised Mr Trump for threatening to pull American troops out of South Korea, unless America is paid a great deal more for maintaining forces on the peninsula. North Korean news outlets have called Mr Trump “wise” for saying that he would be willing to talk to Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.

That is the problem with candidates for the American presidency saying rash and ignorant things about isolated, paranoid and ruthless regimes. Even when the only thing being shot off, for now, is a populist’s mouth, real people risk getting hurt.

Mrs Clinton criticised her opponent for praising “dictators like Vladimir Putin” and for having spoken admiringly about the bloody Chinese crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. True and true, again, alas. At moments, Mrs Clinton seemed to be having just a bit too much fun. The 2016 election cycle has offered many confounding moments, but even Lexington, in his jaundiced state, was briefly startled to hear a former secretary of state and senator saying of her Republican opponent: “I will leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.” Maybe I am being priggish and this is the election cycle in which madman gags become the norm, but one of the two people in the sentence above is likely to be the next American president.

Why did Mrs Clinton lay on the scorn so thickly? One cynical answer, swiftly supplied by conservative commentators on social media, is that she needs to distract attention away from her own vulnerabilities, from her terrible decision to use an insecure private e-mail server while running the State Department, to the fact that some big diplomatic initiatives of her time as America’s top diplomat did not work out very well, from the toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, to the abortive “reset” of relations with the Kremlin, when America tested the theory that President Dimitry Medvedev might be a more constructive partner than his then-prime minister, Mr Putin.

A typical gibe came from Hugh Hewitt, a radio talk-show host who has made foreign policy a speciality, who tweeted during the speech: “Why believe anything @HillaryClinton says about @realDonaldTrump when you can’t believe anything she says on her server?” Others poured scorn on Mrs Clinton’s right to talk tough about Russia. But their bluster cannot conceal a real problem for Republicans whose foreign-policy beliefs are even vaguely Reaganesque. For while many Republicans are sincere in their belief that President Barack Obama and Mrs Clinton have been insufficiently tough on Mr Putin, they still have to wrestle with the idea that Mr Trump, their own nominee, calls the Russian president “very bright” and a “strong leader”; has mused aloud about “an easing of tensions” with Russia; and said that he would ask members of the 28-member NATO alliance to “pay up” or “get out”, while suggesting that the alliance is itself “obsolete”.

Mrs Clinton’s speech served several purposes, in fact. Her aim is in part to make foreign-policy hawks in the Republican Party squirm and writhe at the idea of backing Mr Trump, an “America First” unilateralist who says that he would be willing to walk away from providing security in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, unless allies over and above the cost of maintaining American bases worldwide.

Sneakily, Mrs Clinton portrayed Mr Trump as simultaneously rash and clueless in his policy pronouncements, but consistent in his pessimism about America. Mr Trump has for decades said that the world is “laughing” at America, she noted, even buying full-page newspaper ads in 1987 when Reagan was president, “saying that America lacked a backbone and the world was—you guessed it—laughing at us.” You have to wonder why someone with so little confidence in America wants to be president, she added.

Within the bubble of Washington, DC, diplomatic types, Lexington can report this is already working. One Republican expert on Russia policy confided recently that: “I can’t stand her, but I am going to vote for her,” smiling mirthlessly when this reporter suggested that might make a neat bumper-sticker. Among the ranks of elected Republican politicians, it is proving harder to resist the pressure to embrace Mr Trump.

During Mrs Clinton’s speech, news broke that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, has issued an op-ed in his local Wisconsin newspaper, saying that he will vote for Mr Trump in November. That surrender, which follows weeks of resistance by Mr Ryan, was a bit grudging, with the Speaker writing that he is “confident” that Mr Trump can make the conservative policy agenda of House Republicans a reality. But an endorsement is an endorsement, and shows the awful dilemma that Republican leaders face. As much as some of them may loathe Mr Trump’s policies, and fear that he will lose them the White House, they do not know how to win without his voters.

But Mrs Clinton’s speech was not only aimed at wavering Republicans. She has yet to put the Democratic nomination away, though it is almost impossible for her left-wing rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to beat her. So another clear aim of the San Diego address was to woo leftish Democrats who think of Mrs Clinton as too hawkish, and have never forgiven her for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mrs Clinton’s attack on Mr Trump duly cast him as a dangerous and thin-skinned blowhard with such a short temper that he might blunder into a war.

Still, millions of Americans on right and left will probably have tuned out Mrs Clinton: she heads into this election with appallingly low approval ratings, beaten only by Mr Trump’s even lower scores. So why the glee and unfeigned passion in her delivery? One answer is that perhaps the most important audience for her speech was one man: the Republican nominee himself. Mrs Clinton has a strong interest in needling and provoking Mr Trump, for the simple reason that he responds so badly to criticism. There was a certain blood-sport aspect to hearing Mrs Clinton predicting that Mr Trump would respond to her speech with rude tweets, and asking her listeners to imagine him in the White House’s Situation Room, making life-and-death calls. “Do we want him making those calls—someone thin-skinned and quick to anger, who lashes out at the smallest criticism?” she asked.

Her tactic worked. Moments earlier, Mr Trump had indeed sent out a snarky tweet, saying: “Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the teleprompter! She doesn’t even look presidential!” It is a measure of the campaign to come that provoking a thin-skinned Trump-tweet, for Mrs Clinton, is a win. The country faces 22 more weeks of this.