Trump Takes His Twitter Assault On Hillary Clinton Offline

It’s been a bad week for Donald Trump. And what does Donald Trump do when he has a bad week? He tries to redirect the news cycle by making someone else look bad.

And so it went this morning, as Trump delivered a scathing attack on presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton before a crowd of supporters and the press in a crystal-chandeliered meeting room at his Trump Soho hotel. In a speech that was far more traditional than the ad-libbed rants he's delivered in stadiums across the US, Trump railed on Clinton's record as Secretary of State, criticized the Clinton Foundation's connections with foreign governments, and cribbed entire passages from anti-Clinton books like Clinton Cash to frame Clinton as "the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency."

But Trump’s tongue-lashing began, as it often does, in a Tweetstorm yesterday. As the media buzzed about Trump’s dismal fundraising numbers, declining polls, and the recent firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the real estate mogul tried to shift the spotlight to Clinton, condemning the former Secretary of State’s record while in office and the Clinton Foundation’s purportedly nefarious connections.

Speaking to a crowd of hundreds, not thousands, as is customary on the campaign trail, Trump continued the assault, reading from a Teleprompter as he launched uncharacteristically detailed strikes against Clinton. He spoke, for instance, of the news that Clinton's State Department team appointed a top Clinton Foundation donor named Rajiv Fernando to a national security board, despite having no national security experience. He referenced the sale of major US uranium holdings to Russia by top Clinton Foundation donors. And he rightly called Clinton out for once claiming she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996, when in reality, she was greeted by a child bearing a poem.

For a candidate who often communicates in 140 characters or less and uses nicknames to lambast the competition online (Clinton is "Crooked Hillary") Trump's speech was startling if only for its specificity and traditional format. Trump, who mostly stuck to the script, even relied on old political tropes, like quoting members of the American electorate—in this case, a mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant—to get his point across. He didn't bash the press—spokesperson Hope Hicks even intervened with security to let several members of Trump's media blacklist into the event.

Trump also offered up a plan—however vague—for his first 100 days in office. He would, he said, appoint a new Supreme Court justice, lift energy restrictions, pass "massive tax reform," change the immigration system, and cancel "rules and regulations that send jobs overseas." In typical Trump fashion, the plans were devoid of detail.

But the speech wasn't meant to be about Trump. It was meant to demean Clinton. The tone and depth of his attacks on her are clearly meant to convey that with Lewandowski out and noted autocrat image renovator Paul Manafort in, Trump, is changing, too. (Mainstream Republicans certainly hope so.) Or perhaps it's just a sign that Trump is learning to read the crowd, curbing his urge to improvise in order to win over a relatively reserved Manhattan crowd.

Of course, Trump still delivered enough whoppers to drive fact-checkers into a tailspin. In one ad-libbed line, Trump asserted, for instance, that the United States is "the highest taxed nation in the world." It's not. He once again claimed the United States has "no way to screen" refugees. It does. Even as Trump tried to position Clinton as "a world class liar," he too distorted the truth. If the past is any indication, he'll likely get away with it.

But Trump wasn't just targeting Republican voters with his remarks; in maligning Clinton's character, he was once again ripping a page right out of the Bernie Bro handbook. He essentially admitted as much, re-upping a plea to Bernie Sanders supporters:

"The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money," Trump said. "That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement: so together we can fix the system for all Americans."

In an interview with C-Span, Sanders said he doubts his supporters will fall for it.

The Clinton rapid response team has yet to release an official response to Trump's speech, as it has so often done in the past. Instead, in an indication that some of Trump's stabs may be tough to defend, the Clinton camp tried a little media misdirection of its own, calling her Twitter followers’ attention to a certain sit-in taking place on Capitol Hill.