I’ve been saying that one of the problems with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before” line is that it prevents us from consigning the Republican Party to the oblivion it deserves. In making Trump sui generis, by insisting that he is an utter novelty, you allow the rest of the party to distance themselves from him, to make him extreme and themselves respectable, and to regroup after November.

Now a leaked email from DNC Communication Director Luis Miranda, which I stumbled across in Carl Beijer’s excellent discussion here, makes plain just how costly this strategy is. Writing back in May, Miranda protests that the Clinton campaign wants to separate Trump from the GOP so that it can point to all the Republican officials who oppose Trump and support her. But as Miranda points out, what’s good for Clinton is bad for down-ballot Democrats. So long as down-ballot Republicans distance themselves from Trump, he says, Clinton is willing to give them an out, thereby hurting their Democratic opponents. (And as Carl points out, Clinton is keeping a lot of the money her organization raised for down-ballot Democrats, doubly hurting them.)

Not only is this bad for down-ballot Democrats. It lets the entire Republican Party—all the decades of its rotten, racist, revanchist formations—off the hook. Clinton gets to say she has the support of mainstream, respectable Republicans; they get to say, if not I’m with her, then at least I’m not with him. And with that, a ticket to legitimacy.

We’re now seeing the fruition of that campaign, as Clinton rolls out one endorsement after another: John Negroponte, enabler of death squads in Central America; Michael Hayden, the man who, according to Jane Mayer, made “living on the edge” the motto of US foreign policy after 9/11 ; and, if Clinton can land him, the biggest prize of them all: Henry Kissinger, of whom Kissinger biographer Greg Grandin recently wrote: “He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor.” All of these men are among the most bloodthirsty elements in the right-wing firmament. But now they’ve been re-branded as “center-right foreign policy voices.”

So that’s what is at stake with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before.” This isn’t an academic argument about history; this has real consequences at the ballot box. In Congress, in state legislatures, and in elections to come.

Here’s the text of Miranda’s leaked email:

Hi Amy, the Clinton rapid response operation we deal with have been asking us to disaggregate Trump from down ballot Republicans. They basically want to make the case that you either stand with Ryan or with Trump, that Trump is much worse than regular Republicans and they don’t want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal. They wanted us to basically praise Ryan when Trump was meeting Ryan, or at a minimum to hold him up as an example. So they want to embrace the “Republicans fleeing Trump” side, but not hold down ballot GOPers accountable. That’s a problem. I pushed back that we cannot have our state parties hold up Paul Ryan as a good example of anything. And that we can’t give down ballot Republicans such an easy out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they’re just as bad on specific policies, make them uncomfortable where he’s particularly egregious, but asking state Parties to praise House Republicans like Ryan would be damaging for the Party down ballot. Can you help us navigate this with Charlie? We would basically have to throw out our entire frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump. It just doesn’t work from the Party side. Let me know what you think. Thanks, – Luis.

As Miranda shows in his P.S., it’s very clear that not only was this “Trump is so different” line a deliberate line created by the Clinton people to suit her own interests; it also ran against the way many Democratic insiders, including heavy-hitters in Congress, wanted to frame the fight. Here again is Miranda:

P.S. – – that strategy would ALSO put us at odds with Schumer, Lujan, Pelosi, Reid, basically all of our Congressional Democrats who have embraced our talking points and have been using them beautifully over the last couple of weeks to point out that GOPers in Congress have been pushing these ugly policies for years. Trying to dump this approach would probably not work with Members of Congress, it’s worse than turning an aircraft carrier, we would lose 3/4 of the fleet. Let me know what you think. It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton (which I don’t believe), I think instead she needs as many voices as possible on the same page.

Update (12 am)

This, incidentally, is how you know—one of the many ways you know—that Clinton’s is not going to be a realignment presidency. Realignment presidents run not against a candidate from the opposing party. They run against an entire political and social deformation. Lincoln against the slaveocracy, FDR against laissez-faire rule, Reagan against the New Deal. They run against decades and decades of rule and ruin. In working so hard to separate Trump not only from the Republican present but the Republican past, Clinton is deliberately announcing that her campaign is not against a political formation but is instead simply an effort to defeat one man. I’d say it was a missed opportunity, but from the beginning it was clear that Clinton didn’t see the election in these terms. And the truth is, neither does the Democratic Party apparatus and its leadership. They want a return to the status quo ante, to life before Trump, when we had things like the Iraq War, massive tax cuts, and the like to contend with.