On Wednesday, he will make the anti-Clinton speech that was supposed to have been delivered last Monday, before he preempted himself with a post-Orlando cavalcade of fear-mongering. Trump has long hinted that he’ll attack Hillary Clinton through Bill Clinton—less his presidency than his affairs and scandals. But there are now indications that Trump is going to focus on one particular source of scandal, the Clinton Foundation. Politico posted a roundup of Trump’s recent attacks, which suggest where he’s headed:
Trump declared that “Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund,” during a speech June 7 at his Westchester County golf club. On Tuesday... he accused the former first couple of “laundering” money and making “hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts.”
Trump’s claims about the Clinton Foundation seem like a counterweight to Hillary Clinton’s charges that he is a fraud who would destroy the economy. They turn her supposed strength (that she’s an experienced statesman) into a possible weakness (that she uses that experience to enrich herself). But it’s also particularly Trump-ian to take a subtle controversy—the Clinton Foundation, after all, is a charity that helps many people around the world—and turn it into something blatantly nefarious. Laundering money isn’t exactly murdering Vince Foster, but it’s still a profound oversimplification, whatever you think of the Clintons’ conflicts of interest. There’s plenty of grist at the Clinton Foundation if you want to allege corruption, but everything we’ve seen from Trump so far suggests he’ll veer into the conspiratorial.