Hillary Clinton’s Donald Trump challenge has little to do with issues.
It’s how she responds to his brass-knuckles tone and bluster — a style that felled Republican competitors from Rick Perry to Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio.
There’s no playbook for Democrats when it comes to the real estate mogul who grew up in the hothouse of the Big Apple’s tabloid media.
Yet, as Clinton and Trump veer closer to their party’s 2016 presidential nominations, the former U.S. senator from New York is getting some advice from her inner circle.
They’re citing Clinton's brief Senate match-up against Rudy Giuliani, the Brooklyn-born former New York City mayor who spent several months testing the waters against Clinton in early 2000.
“That is the perfect race for this,” said Neera Tanden, who was Clinton’s deputy campaign manager at the time. “There were no issues in that race — he’s a bully, Donald Trump’s a bully,” said Tanden, who went on to serve as a top Clinton policy aide in 2008.
In 2000, The New York Times called the Clinton-Giuliani faceoff a “spectacle of a race” that was also historic in that it would mark the first time a former first lady had been elected to the Senate.
Like Trump, Giuliani was a bit of an enigma in the Republican Party. He was to the left of the GOP on a number of issues, such as gay rights, and succeeded as New York mayor by picking off various traditional Democratic constituencies — some of the same ones Clinton was struggling with.
He had also angered some minority groups by defending New York’s law enforcement culture after the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, killed by four plainclothes officers.
Clinton has drawn parallels between 2000 and 2016. During a February Democratic town hall, Clinton mentioned her 2000 race and said “people were barraging,” citing Giuliani by name.
Given his more moderate record, Clinton focused instead on Giuliani’s temperament and cast him as too combative. She also sought to paint him as a xenophobe by playing up appearance on the same state as far-right Austrian leader Joerg Haider. And she focused on minority outreach, including visiting a number of black churches.
USA TODAY reached out to Giuliani, but his office said the former mayor was unavailable for comment.
Giuliani ultimately decided against running in 2000 after a prostate cancer diagnosis and amid marital strife after news reports of an affair. Clinton went on to crush Rick Lazio, then a 42-year-old Long Island congressman, to capture the Senate seat.
Trump has already consulted with Giuliani during his campaign. In a Wednesday appearance on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor, Giuliani said he's close to making an endorsement. "Here's my goal: I don't want Hillary in the White House," he said. "Right now, Trump looks like the best one to me."
Both Clinton and Trump will retool their strategy for a general election race as they seek to appeal to more moderate voters. For Trump, that may include considering whether his entertaining but aggressive debate performances will be as effective opposite a woman and with a general election audience.
“A tough attack on a female politician can very easily be viewed as bullying,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who’s advised leading House and Senate Republicans.
Trump appears to have unveiled a moniker for the Democratic presidential front-runner, calling her "incompetent," and Clinton has returned fire, labeling Trump a “bully” during a speech before a leading American-Israeli group this week in Washington.
“I don’t think Trump’s going to have a stylistic makeover,” said Lee Miringoff, a poll director at Marist College in New York who’s familiar with both men. For instance, Trump experienced blowback during the primary for disparaging Republican Carly Fiorina’s facial features.
“But I also think Hillary Clinton in the past has done very well in the so-called victim role, and that goes back to the 1990s,” he said.
In the Senate race, Clinton also portrayed Lazio as a bully after a debate performance in which he crossed the stage to confront her. Clinton later joked that having two younger brothers had prepared her for the moment, and Lazio faced questions about whether he had turned off female voters.
“I was able to just keep going and tell people, 'Here’s who I am, here’s what I do,'” Clinton said in February. “And I won.”
Clinton has indicated she’ll avoid directly tangling with Trump, who sharply attacked her husband’s extramarital history after Clinton suggested late last year that he was sexist. At a January town hall in Des Moines, she said her New Year’s resolution is to let Trump live in his “alternate reality.”
Yet it’s unlikely she can avoid direct confrontation for long, and that’s where her experience with Giuliani comes in, says Tanden.
“It took her a while to get her footing. She finally, one day, started to laugh at him. She called him a bully and started to laugh,” she said. “It literally drove him crazy,” said Tanden. “That was the beginning of the end of his candidacy,” she said.
Jeff Berkowitz, who was Giuliani’s research director during his 2008 presidential run, said that same approach is unlikely to hurt Trump.
“Both parties are on the verge of nominating the most unpopular and least-liked people probably to ever be nominated,” he said. “Trump is growing the base by being confrontational. I suspect Trump is going to be immune from all of that.”
In 2014, Giuliani offered some advice to any Republican planning to face off with the former first lady in an interview with Politico.
“The wrong way is to be too aggressive, and be too mean, and to ever get personal,” said Giuliani.
“The right way to do it is on policy and on true contribution,” he said.
