Hillary Clinton to Target Donald Trump’s Economic Policy in Ohio Speech

Hillary Clinton plans to give a speech Tuesday excoriating Donald Trump’s proposals for the economy and his business record, continuing a series of targeted speeches this month aiming to define the real estate mogul before the general election campaign begins in full swing.

Speaking in Columbus, Ohio, Clinton will argue that as president, Trump “would very likely drive us off a cliff and working families would bear the brunt of the impact in terms of lost jobs, lost savings, and lost livelihoods,” Jake Sullivan, senior adviser to the campaign, said in a statement.

“That’s the natural conclusion you reach when you look at Trump’s policy proposals, his rash and reckless temperament, and his record in the private sector of doing harm to working families and small businesses,” Sullivan said.

It will be the third carefully planned speech Clinton has given this month that portrays Trump as unfit to be president: in early June, she criticized his foreign policy proposals as “dangerously incoherent,” and last week, Clinton attacked his proposed ban on refugees and Muslim immigration, calling him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified” to be president.

Trump has struck back at Clinton, and his campaign has distanced itself from the original tax proposal released last year, saying it was open to revision.

The Clinton campaign’s decision to portray Trump as a self-interested tycoon who stepped on the livelihoods of working people closely mirrors the strategy of the Obama campaign in 2012. In that year, Democrats painted Mitt Romney as a callous exporter of American jobs, an argument that was particularly potent in states like Ohio, where Clinton will speak on Tuesday.

Clinton’s allies, including her surrogates and super PACs, are digging through Trump’s business record, too, which includes repeated bankruptcies and accounts of working families who were never fully compensated for work on Trump’s projects.

Trump’s tax plan would lower tax rates and limit deductions, reducing federal revenues by $9.5 trillion, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Trump has also threatened tariffs as high as 45% on goods from China.

A new analysis by the economic research firm Moody’s Analytics suggests that Trump’s trade, taxes, immigration and spending policies would reduce economic output and reduce employment by 3.5 million jobs in his first term. The lead author on the report was economist Mark Zandi, an adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The Clinton campaign has touted the report as an indication of Trump’s policies and retweeted it from Hillary Clinton’s twitter account.

Trump, meanwhile, has taken to criticizing Clinton and President Obama on Twitter himself.

Clinton is well ahead of Trump in preparing for a general election, with more than $40 million on hand in the beginning of June compared with Trump’s paltry $1.3 million.

Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have large staffs deployed in swing states and in their Brooklyn headquarters, a total of 700, and have already reserved more than $20 million in advertising ahead of November.