How Clinton aims to trump Trump on Twitter

Hillary Clinton’s “de-lete your account” moment was no fluke: Her tweet heard round the world was just the most viral example of her newly aggressive effort to take the 2016 fight directly to Donald Trump on his favorite social media turf.

After a long primary campaign in which Trump has used Twitter to pump out an endless stream of taunts at rivals and gobble up news coverage, Clinton’s campaign has rolled out a strategy in recent weeks to turn the presumptive GOP nominee's own words against him — with some sly sarcasm and snark. Her barbs may appear off the cuff but are sometimes planned and edited well in advance, making the Clinton-Trump war on Twitter an extension of the contrast between their distinct political styles: staff-driven and tightly scripted versus shoot-f-rom-the-hip, aggressive and biting.

Thursday’s skirmish represented the peak Twitter moment of the 2016 campaign so far. When Trump tweeted out an attack on President Barack Obama's endorsement of “Crooked Hillary,” her campaign responded five minutes later with “De-lete your account” — a time-honored social media jibe that quickly became her most popular tweet ever, with more than 420,000 retweets and over half a million likes by Friday afternoon. (That far surpassed the traffic of Trump’s infamous “Taco Bowl” tweet f-rom Cinco de Mayo.)

Trump waited more than two hours to tweet a response to Clinton: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up — and whe-re are your 33,000 emails that you de-leted?”

Clinton’s team also prepared a Twitter trap for her rival last week, when she delivered a blistering speech in San Diego that denounced Trump’s worldview as a series of “bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” When Trump tweeted that she was telling tall tales — "She made up things that I said or believe but have no basis in fact. Not honest!” — her account dryly responded, “You literally said all those things,” linking to a page that listed dozens of Trump’s statements on topics like torture, terrorism, Mexico, Russia and the pope.

According to the Clinton campaign, her tweet was viewed more than 2 million times.

The Clinton campaign says it teed up that tweet hours before her speech, assuming — correctly — that Trump would take the bait. And that's actually a strategy that Twitter advises the campaigns to follow: gaming out future events and storing up especially savvy tweets, including GIFs and video, that might match those situations.

“The Clinton campaign is particularly good at planning to be spontaneous,” says Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio.

Her campaign also recently began tweeting short clips, set to “Hail to the Chief,” featuring Trump in his own words on topics like pregnancy (“an inconvenience for a business”) and prisoners of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”). It tweeted out a c-hart slamming Trump on his claims of foreign policy experience: “Donald Trump has never negotiated a ceasefire, but he can throw a mean pageant!”

“There are two ways to get compelling content out on social media,” Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in an interview. “One is to be over the top, insulting and saying outrageous things — otherwise known as the Trump strategy. And one is to be fair, accurate, targeted and informative. That’s very much what we’re doing.”

Many allies see Clinton treading a path spearheaded by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite among progressive Democrats who has made sport of going after Trump on Twitter.

“Elizabeth Warren has shown it’s possible to both be strong on substance and throw strong punches,” says Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Clinton’s joining Warren in the sandbox, punching the bully in the face, and pivoting to substantive ideas along the way.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Clinton still faces a tall order to match Trump’s intensity on Twitter, which he has used relentlessly to promote himself and attack his enemies since signing on in 2009. He has amassed 8.8 million followers — some 2 million more than Clinton, who didn’t join until 2013 — and has compiled a large body of work: about 32,000 tweets, compared with Clinton’s 5,900.

Trump’s posts, too, regularly get tens of thousands of “likes,” such as when he wrote on Monday that “Crooked Hillary Clinton has not held a news conference in more than 7 months. Her record is so bad she is unable to answer tough questions!”

The candidates' personalities find echoes in their Twitter accounts. Trump’s tweeting style seems to match the candidate and are often unorthodox in grammar and spelling — including his misspellings of “telepromter” [sic] and the defense he offered for the size of his campaign staff: “Small is good, flexible, save money, and number one!” Clinton’s tweets, in contrast, appear much more scripted and deliberate.

Trump has talked about his appreciation for Twitter as a tool to confront his critics. “For years, if somebody did bad stuff to me, I couldn’t fight back,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last year. “Now I have @realDonaldTrump and I can sort of tweet some bad stuff about them, and if people like it, it’s all over the world.”

He’s taken that approach into the campaign, including his earlier battle with GOP rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. “Leighweight [sic] chocker [sic] Marco Rubio looks like a little boy on stage,” he tweeted in February, before replacing that post with a correctly spelled version. "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” hetweeted to Cruz the following month, inspiring a frenzy of media speculation about what information he was threatening to reveal.

Trump was still fully at it Friday, blasting out counterattacks on “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”

Clinton, meanwhile, has had a famously fraught relationship with technology. She struggled to work a fax machine, according to emails released in the ongoing investigation of her use of a private server as secretary of State. Her staff, at the time, noted that she wasn’t comfortable checking messages on a desktop computer.

Obama joked at this year's White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner that Clinton’s pitch to young voters was “a little bit like your relative just signed up for Facebook: ‘Dear America, did you get my poke?’ … Love, Aunt Hillary.”

Still, she is not entirely new to wielding Twitter as a 2016 weapon. As Trump and his GOP opponents went at it during a shout-filled March debate, her campaign tweeted an animated GIF showing herself looking bored, head in hand, an image provocatively plucked f-rom her daylong Capitol Hill testimony on the Benghazi attacks. Her post was retweeted 25,000 times, making it the most popular tweet of the Republicans’ debate night.

As her campaign looks past Bernie Sanders to a general election face-off with Trump, it’s increasingly trying to use the real estate mogul’s voluminous statements against him in a kind of social media jujitsu.

Take Trump’s now-infamous tweet showing himself and a taco bowl with the phrase “I love Hispanics!” When he later suggested that a federal judge couldn’t act fairly in a case involving Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, the Clinton campaign took to Twitter to declare: “So much for the taco bowls."

The Clinton camp is hoping her boosted Twitter presence finds a ready audience in a press that is increasingly challenging Trump’s utterances. In that way, Clinton is able to inject her take into news stories even as she has gone months without holding a press conference.

“It’s the quickest way to make sure the media has the facts Trump likes to ignore,” says Ferguson, the Clinton campaign spokesman.

In many ways, rapid response has been a feature of Clinton’s political toolbox for decades. She came up with the name for the “war room” made famous by George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala and James Carville during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign. The tech weapons of choice back then were fax machines and early mobile phones, but the aim was much the same — using speed and aggression to try to outfox the George H.W. Bush campaign.

Even Clinton allies say she has to take care in how she responds to Trump in real time. In March, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe fretted that her challenge would be to respond to Trump’s often colorful and controversial commentary without engaging in the sort of name-calling that seemed to damage Rubio’s prospects near the end of his candidacy.

“You’re literally never going to sleep, because you do not know what’s going to come out of this guy’s mouth,” Plouffe said of Trump. "How do you compete with that? Do you be more crazy? Do you say more insulting things? That's not really going to be Hillary Clinton's M.O., but somehow you've got to deal with that."

Clinton, though, has lately indicated she’s not above provoking Trump into a social media clash.

“We all know the tools Donald Trump brings to the table: bragging, mocking, composing nasty tweets,” she said in her California speech on the Republican’s qualifications in global statecraft. She added, grinning, “I’m willing to bet he’s writing a few right now.”