Hillary Clinton Shares Predictably Bad Advice for How to Beat Trump

T here are just some things in life that Hillary Clinton will not help you navigate. If you’re looking for investment tips in futures markets or optimal data-storage solutions, Clinton is not your best bet. You wouldn’t go to Clinton for advice on how to win over converts to your health-care-reform plan or to identify real-estate-development corporations with great potential for returns on investment. And you don’t go asking Clinton for thoughts on how to beat Donald Trump in a presidential race.

That counsel is lost on the New York Times, which recently sat down with Clinton to press her for thoughts on how Kamala Harris might best Trump on tonight’s debate stage. The outlet got from her precisely what it was soliciting: bad advice.

In response to reporter Reid Epstein’s first question, Clinton produced a revisionist history designed solely to burnish her own tarnished record as a campaigner. “What do you remember about your own preparations to debate Donald Trump?” Epstein asked. She didn’t answer the question directly. Rather, she recalled being “literally ridiculed” for preparing for the debate at all.

“So, basically I said, ‘Yeah, I did prepare,’” Clinton added. “And I’ll tell you something else I prepared for: I prepared to be president.” Indeed, Clinton did say those words, almost verbatim, and she remembers them so well because they were so obviously rehearsed ahead of the debate. And when she said those words, it was not in response to being “literally ridiculed” moments earlier. It seemed to come from nowhere — it certainly didn’t come off like a response to the remarks from Trump that preceded it. It was a canned line, and deploying too many canned lines makes you appear robotic and over-coached. That’s exactly what Harris needs to avoid.

Partly as an outgrowth of her efforts to avoid all but the friendliest venues, Harris has cultivated the impression that she is the product of a well-managed public-relations campaign. Voters don’t know who the real Kamala Harris is, or even if there is a real Kamala Harris. Making herself out to be an automaton programed to rattle off zingers that thrill the very-online Left and no one else is precisely how Harris could blow tonight’s opportunity to reintroduce herself to voters.

“I also knew I had to brush Trump back,” Clinton continued, “and not let him be the center of attention all the time.” And a lot of good that did her. Trump leaves persuadable voters with a bad taste in their mouths when he’s given all the requisite space to indulge his grievances or retreat into self-soothing fictions that paper over his public humiliations. By contrast, Trump is famously compelling when he’s fighting his way out of a corner. Of course, Harris must throw Trump off balance, but doing so in a way that renders Trump the sympathetic party is unwise.

So that covers ends. What about means? Hillary has some thoughts on those as well. “I think she needs to be prepared enough that she feels really comfortable going on both offense and defense against Trump,” she said, “because there’s a lot to cover with him.”

Good stuff, coach. Both offense and defense are important components of a comprehensive game plan — indeed, they’re the only components of a comprehensive game plan. Maybe it’s unfair to call this bad advice, insofar as it’s not really advice at all. It’s just a rote description of what a debate is.

But Hillary didn’t stop there. “You have to go back at him about his really terrible record as president,” she continued. “She should bait him. He can be rattled. He doesn’t know how to respond to substantive, direct attacks.”

Is there a single American of voting age who doesn’t think Trump “can be rattled” — that he’s a famously imperturbable stoic possessed of near-otherworldly discipline? Trump is one of the most irascible figures in our public life. But if there’s a “substantive” attack against him that he is eager to parry, it’s on his record as president.

In fact, Trump would like nothing better than to argue that he provided voters relative safety and prosperity between January 2017 and March 2020. If Harris is to bring up Trump’s record at all, it should be to argue that electing Trump will not bring back the economy of his first term; it will just bring back him and all he entails.

With that, Hillary returned to the thing that brings her the most joy: giving herself credit for victories that exist only in her own mind. “I mean, when I said he was a Russian puppet and he just sputtered onstage,” she opined, “I think that’s an example of how you get out a fact about him that really unnerves him.”

Remember that one? That was the jab that led Trump to blurt out the memorable yet incomprehensible retort, “No puppet. You’re the puppet.” Trump did seem flustered by the accusation, but debate watchers keyed into that exchange soon saw Clinton and Trump unleash an unflattering barrage of crosstalk — a flurry that brought Clinton right down to Trump’s level. Nor did the accusation Clinton deployed age well.

Democrats devoted much of Trump’s presidency to their presumption that he owed his 2016 victory to Russian influence, but their inquisition came to nothing. Retailing what was, in fact, a baseless conspiracy theory might have felt good in the moment, but posterity has not been kind to the Democrats who convinced themselves Vladimir Putin was and remains Trump’s secret benefactor.

If Clinton was interested in actually helping Harris rather than polishing her own apple, she would have informed her die-hard supporters that they should expect to be disappointed. If Harris swings for the rafters in an attempt to craft that magical sentence that finally undoes Trump and exposes him as the fraud Democrats know him to be, she’ll bomb the debate.

Voters know all they need to know about Trump. There is no untested line of attack on him that will dislodge his supporters. Harris’s only hope in November is to convince persuadable voters on the sidelines of a year defined by anti-incumbent sentiment that she is a safe bet, a steady and predictable hand on the tiller with an allergy to drama and spectacle.

Maybe Kamala Harris can be that candidate. Most certainly, Hillary Clinton was not.