As the general election nears, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been lobbing more direct attacks at each other. | Getty Trump, Clinton preview general-election bout

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton traded punches late this week, offering a preview of what a general-election clash might portend as both candidates draw closer to earning their respective parties' nominations.

Trump resurrected his line that Clinton will only be able to play the "women card" and began referring to her as "Crooked Hillary," while Clinton likened her would-be opponent to an online bully and urged Americans to "stand up" to him.


“The only thing she’s got going is the women card," Trump said in an interview with Fox News' "Watters World" set to air Saturday night, according to excerpts released by the network. "Without the women card, she’s got nothing going and she’s gonna play it to the hilt and I’m gonna be talking about things and one of the things I talk about is, we call her 'Crooked Hillary' because she’s a crooked person — she’s always been a crooked person.”

Clinton, who has recently addressed the role of online bullying in various contexts, spoke to a group of women at a Pennsylvania campaign event discussing pay equity on Friday in which she remarked, according to The Washington Post's account, that her campaign against Trump would be all about exposing his "insults" and "derogatory comments."

Those remarks echo what the former secretary of state told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday morning, after the show played a clip of Trump applying his new "Crooked Hillary" moniker and pointing to criticism from Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders.

"OK, there's the first attack," said co-anchor George Stephanopoulos, who served as a top adviser to President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign and briefly in the White House.

Clinton replied, "I am not going to be responding to all the crazy stuff he says. I think we're going to talk about what's going to be good for America, how we're going to make potential and promise that every person in this country should be able to take advantage of."

Trump returned to the "woman card" line in the same interview with Jesse Watters, a line of attack he employed for a time toward the end of 2015 and beginning of the new year.

"She’s got the woman card, which is her best thing, except women don’t like her. She’s the worst possible representative a woman can have," Trump said. "But, she’s also got the Obama card and that’s a disaster for her cause four more years of Obama — this country’s gonna be destroyed.”

Explaining his "Crooked Hillary" branding of Clinton, Trump said the name "came to [him]," noting that he likes "branding people if they’re correct."

"I mean, some you can brand, I’ve done a good job on branding some of my opponents and what we just did, but I will tell you, the word[s] 'Crooked Hillary' [are] 100 percent correct,” Trump said. “She is a person who’s got many, many flaws. She’s a woman, but yet women don’t like her, which is really sort of interesting. I mean, she is a woman, but she’s not liked by women. So, I think we’re gonna do very well with Hillary and I think the polls are starting to show it already.”

The RealClearPolitics average of the past month of polls bears out a different story — Clinton leads Trump by 9 percentage points nationwide in hypothetical matchups.

Matching up against Clinton in the general election was very much on Trump's mind during a Friday-afternoon rally in Harrington, Delaware.

"It will be the greatest turnout of voters in the history of the United States," he told the crowd, briefly directing his fire toward Ted Cruz and John Kasich. "When they get out, we will start on Hillary Clinton like no one's ever seen before."

"We're going to have an unbelievable time."

Brianna Gurciullo contributed.