Donald Trump’s campaign has found possibly the most bizarre attack so far against Hillary Clinton: She doesn’t care as much about policy as he does.
Trump’s team claims Clinton has no child care policy. It’s been on her website for a year.
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Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
It started Tuesday in Iowa, when Trump claimed Clinton is running “a policy-free campaign.”
Then Ivanka Trump picked it up: “There’s no policy on Hillary Clinton’s website pertaining to any of these issues, child care, eldercare, or maternity leave or paternity leave for that matter,” she said, in remarks first noted by ThinkProgress. “There’s no policy that’s been articulated on how to solve the problem.”
If you’re tempted to bet against Hillary Clinton having a policy about anything on her website, that’s probably a bad idea. It’s an especially bad idea when it relates to the issues she’s put at the center of not just her campaign but much of her public career. HillaryClinton.com is virtually buried in policy proposals for child care, family leave, and elder care (including a special section on Alzheimer’s disease).
Trump’s website, meanwhile, has almost no policy on it at all. Even now, it spotlights just eight issues — and that’s counting “immigration” and “pay for the wall” separately.
It’s the latest example of a bizarre tendency the Trump campaign has to parrot whatever attacks Clinton makes on Trump — regardless of whether they make any sense in context.
When Clinton spent early August painting Trump as unstable and dangerous, he turned around and made the same attack on her. When she accused his campaign of playing to bigots, he called her a bigot. Now he’s accusing her of running a “hate-filled,” “policy-free campaign” — even though her strategy has sometimes seemingly been to crush opponents under an avalanche of white papers.
Of course, voters aren’t making up their minds by counting the proposals on a candidate’s website, and just having a plan doesn’t necessarily mean the plan has been thoroughly considered or is a good idea. But it’s an open question whether these untrue attacks will work.
