To Beat Donald Trump, Hillary’s Only Chance is to Starve Him of Attention

Here is Hillary Clinton’s problem, in a nutshell: Nobody really likes her beyond a small base of fanatics, she’s not funny, and and she has a unique ability to seem like she’s lying, even when she’s not. As a nation, we’re not going to be pumped to have Hillary Clinton as a president. That’s just never going to happen, and the sooner she and her advisors accept that, and the sooner they abandon all plans for a doomed charm offensive, the better off they’ll be.

Here’s what Hillary Clinton has going for her: She’s not a complete and utter nutjob with an outsized ego that makes her so insecure and combative that she’ll inevitably start a nuclear war with France over a perceived insult due to a hung over translator at the United Nations. In other words, she’s not Donald Trump.

It should be easy for Hillary Clinton to beat Donald Trump, based on her not being a dangerous screwball, but as poll after poll after poll has shown, it’s not going to be easy. To understand why she’s struggling against a guy who has spent most of the last 30 years sending photos of his hands to a magazine columnist, we have to admit a few uncomfortable truths about Donald Trump.

1. He’s funny. I know he’s a racist and a demagogue and a totalitarian in the making, but he’s got a sense of humor that really appeals to psychopaths and hillbillies, but is even objectively funny to stuffy, educated liberals, even though they try to pretend it’s not true. Until Democrats understand that critical fact about Trump, they are going to misunderstand him.

2. He has natural charisma. It’s a sort of batshit charisma—the kind that allows him to call up reporters disguised as his own PR rep, except that he doesn’t bother to disguise his voice at all—but it’s a charisma nonetheless. And when I say charisma, what I mean is natural magnetism, which is different than likability. Everybody is this country is psyched as hell for the first Trump-Clinton debate, and it has nothing to do with Clinton. We want to watch Trump. He’s fun to watch. Cable news network aren’t devoting 98 percent of their coverage to Trump because they ran out of other ideas, or because Bobby Jindal decided to spend more time with his family—they know that deep down in our dark hearts, we want so much Trump that we wake up the next morning with a severe headache, vomiting up bits of an orange hairpiece.

3. He’s a gutter warrior. If you get into a battle of childish insults with Donald Trump, you will lose. That’s especially true if you’re a stiff, phony-sounding career politician like Hillary Clinton. You know that old expression about how an idiot brings you down to his level and then beats you with experience? That’s exactly what’s going to happen to Hillary if she thinks that her team of Ivy League writers can match wits with Trump. This shit comes naturally to him—he doesn’t have to float a trial balloon each time he wants to insult somebody, he just shoots from the hip. Clinton, on the other hand, does not have this move in her arsenal. It’s why we all immediately mocked the “Dangerous Donald” nickname she and the Democrats dreamed up—don’t they get how lame that sounds, and how much it plays right into Trump’s hands? No, they don’t, because they aren’t good at this kind of thing. And it’s only getting worse:

Is it possible for “Clinton aides” to do anything without trial ballooning it in the press first https://t.co/0X6cCykN0N

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) May 29, 2016

Now, in a perfect world, none of this would matter, right? Trump could unleash endless zingers, and nobody would vote for him because we don’t spend the rest of our lives breathing plutonium and giving birth to eight-legged babies and getting rounded up in private security vans at 3 a.m. because our jealous neighbor told the local truth squad commander that we made a crack about President Trump’s tan. We’d laugh at his audacity, and then we’d vote for anyone else, and that would be that.

There are two problems. First, a whole lot of people in this country are racists, and he’s doing a good job stoking their anger and laying the groundwork for a fascist regime. Second, he’s successfully turned this circus of an election cycle into a prolonged performance, and in this kind of drama the entire country gravitates to the most outrageous character.

I would argue that the second problem is actually more pressing, as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned. Yes, what Trump is doing now may help erase the stigma of hatred in America and usher in a horrifying dystopia in the near future, but as of now I’m pretty sure that there aren’t enough racists to win a presidential election. What there are, in abundance, are people who can turn a blind eye to the bigotry, and whose main thought is, “you know what, fuck the system, fuck the liars, this guy is hilarious and I really don’t care anymore because everything is so fucked up anyway.” With that voting bloc, Trump could win.

To beat Trump decisively, Clinton needs to convince these voters that there are real stakes, that the problems are serious, and that treating a presidential election like a reality show can have real consequences. How can she do that? Not by trying to match Trump zinger for zinger, or coming up with stupid ineffectual nicknames for him. Even if she scores a point or two, the larger effect will be to concede that, yes, this whole election is a giant farce that should be viewed primarily as entertainment. That’s a real danger, and God knows the media would be happy to oblige. It would redefine the fight on Trump’s terms, which is exactly what he did in the Republican primary. Remember how satisfied that pathetic establishment cretin Jeb Bush looked the one or two times he managed to deliver an insult without stuttering? Do you think that helped him in any way, or do you think Trump was just luring him in like a stupid, gullible fish, only to bash his head in with a metaphorical frying pan?

If Clinton falls into that trap, she’ll get bashed too. Because here’s a secret: Trump’s people don’t give a single shit if his detractors drop a truth bomb. Truth really doesn’t matter to them, and it never will. Those people are lost to reality, which is why every pundit who predicted the end of his candidacy at each outrageous Trump quote, and each focused attack, was so hilariously, tragically wrong. You cannot beat this guy by going head-to-head with him, because his power runs deeper than truth.

So what should she do instead? The blueprint for victory is obvious:

1. Tap into a super-serious policy wonk side. She’s already got this—she’s about eight thousand times more knowledgeable than Trump on the issues, and she’s good at articulating that knowledge.

2. When the insults inevitably come, don’t respond. Maybe, at most, she could repeat something like, “I think this election is too important to engage in petty name-calling,” and then segue right into the issue at hand.

3. Never engage Trump directly. Act like he’s not even in the room, except to point that his plans lack substance. Let the super PACs, led by the heartless cretin David Brock, do all the dirty work—and even that should be limited, because everybody’s going to know where it came from, and Trump will use it in a heartbeat to try to make things personal.

4. Embody the sober politician who cares about the country. Without saying anything overtly negative about him, make him look like a complete asshole for turning a presidential election into a sideshow.

In short, starve Trump of the attention he craves—negative and positive both—and that he has so effectively channeled into popularity. That will leave him with two options. Either he tries to fight on your level and tries to engage in serious debate, which would expose him for the ignorant buffoon he is, or he continues to be himself, makes people laugh, but ultimately looks way less viable as a president since you won’t join him in the gutter.

Nothing will rattle Trump like being ignored, and there’s a good chance that if Clinton starves him of the attention he craves, he’ll fly off the handle and do something really stupid. But if she agrees to fight on his level, he’ll sit back, flash a smug $50 grin, and run circles around her. Nobody can get dirty quite like Trump, so Hillary’s obvious solution is to stay out of the mud. It goes against every political instinct she’s acted on for an entire lifetime, but it’s the only move that makes sense.