Dems should hit Trump right where he tweets: Gabriel Schoenfeld

With Donald Trump now roughly even with her in the polls, Hillary Clinton’s urgent task is to drive his numbers back down.

Obviously, Trump can be attacked on the issues, where there is so little flesh on some very shaky bones. And just as obviously, Trump can be attacked for his unstable temperament. But an additional step is crucial. Trump's instability can be induced. Hillary touched on this critical vulnerability in one of the most memorable lines of her convention speech Thursday night: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Trump can be baited. The baiting — a form of psychological warfare — needs to be done systematically. Trump’s madness — and he is madder than a hatter — can be drawn out and provoked, to potentially devastating effect.

Waging psychological warfare is precisely what Marco Rubio attempted when he targeted one of Trump’s most well-known neuralgic points: his obsessive defensiveness about the size of his hands. On national television Trump was provoked to swagger not only about his hands but his manhood, drawing headline’s like CNN.com’s “Donald Trump Defends Size of his Penis.”

That has to be counted as a spectacular success for Rubio, but it nonetheless backfired. Rubio felt obliged to apologize while Trump’s standing in the polls was undented. That outcome, however, does not mean the strategy was wrong, only that it was wrongly executed.

Team Hillary might draw several conclusions from the episode. First and most obviously, Trump is vulnerable to psychological warfare; a mature sane adult would simply never behave as he did. Second, Trump survived foibles before an agitated and pumped-up Republican base, but the far broader pool of general election voters has a different dynamic. Blunders by the Rasputin-like Trump may still not do him in, but they hold far greater potential now of inflicting serious damage.

Finally, given her own vulnerabilities, in attempting to provoke Trump, Hillary should not be the one who always takes the kill shots. High-value surrogates can be just as effective with far less risk of blow-back.

In pursuing such a strategy, Trump’s anxieties about his physical attributes by no means exhaust the range of exploitable possibilities. One rich vein is Trump’s thinly veiled angst about his own intelligence, which comes to the surface in incessant boasting.

A 2013 Trump tweet is characteristic: “my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure.” On various occasions, Trump has spoken of his own brain as “big” and “beautiful.” He has also explained that in foreign policy — a subject where he is notably at sea — “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things."

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Once again, this is not how a mature sane adult speaks. The peccadilloes are made even more peculiar by Trump’s explanation for why his intelligence is so elevated. He has repeatedly recurred to his genetic inheritance, not from his parents but, bizarrely, from John Trump, his father’s brother. Extolling his own intelligence on one of several similar occasions, Trump has explained that he has an uncle who was a “top professor” at MIT: “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.”

If the Hillary campaign can find ways to poke needles strategically in this particular balloon, emotional fireworks are virtually guaranteed. The team could insinuate or state directly that Trump’s brain is not “big” or “beautiful” but is in fact defective. Or harp on his refusal to release his college grades (not only at high-prestige Wharton, which he likes to talk about, but at low-prestige Fordham University, which he never talks about).

Trump’s anxieties here are closely related to two other exploitable weak spots: his uncontrollable urge to respond to slights and his persistent worry that the diminutive size of his financial fortune will be exposed.

In the former category, Ted Cruz’s failure to endorse him at the Republican convention precipitated an epic meltdown, with Trump purposelessly lashing out, resurrecting the unhinged notion that Cruz’s father was a co-conspirator in the assassination of JFK. Were it not for the mass shooting that day in Munich, Germany, the episode would have been replayed in an endless loop, and could have hurt Trump's standing deeply.

Trump’s well-documented long-term pattern of exaggerating the size of his fortune would appear to be rooted in the same raw nerve. One need not put Trump on the psychologist’s couch to see that money is his most important proxy for psychic well-being; the more of it he can display and brag about, the better he feels. Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns is almost certainly connected to this dynamic.

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Team Hillary already understands the need to pound away on the returns. But if they are wise, they will simultaneously taunt him about being far less rich than he claims, with the goal of provoking an explosion.

Still other possibilities present themselves: Trump’s utter indifference to the distinction between truth and falsehood, and his complete absence of shame or repentance for any sort of transgression, are both striking pathological conditions that the public would profit from having further demonstrated.

Of course, one cannot be certain that a strategy of psychological warfare will succeed in bringing down a candidate who has flourished despite breaking every rule of the political playbook.

But if Hillary's campaign aims to increase its probability of winning in November, it should make a serious effort to force this deranged personality to walk across a psychological minefield. As November approaches and voters focus on the race, it may take only one or two detonations of the kind we have already witnessed for Trump’s candidacy to be left severely maimed.

Gabriel Schoenfeld is the author of A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider's Account. Follow him on Twitter: @gabeschoenfeld.

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