Hillary Clintons advisers are talking to Donald Trumps ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, seeking insights about Trumps deepest insecurities as they devise strategies to needle and undermine him in four weeks at the first presidential debate, the most anticipated in recent political history.
Her team is also getting advice from psychology experts to help create a personality profile of Trump to gauge how he may respond to attacks and deal with a woman as his sole adversary on the debate stage.
As Clinton pores over this voluminous research with her debate team, most recently for several hours Friday, and her aides continue searching for someone who can rattle her as a Trump stand-in during mock debates, Trump is taking the opposite tack.
Clinton, a deeply competitive debater, wants to crush Trump on live television, but not with an avalanche of policy details; she is searching for ways to bait him into making blunders. Trump, a supremely self-confident communicator, wants viewers to see him as a truth-telling political outsider and trusts that he can box in Clinton on her ethics and honesty.
Trumps certitude I know how to handle Hillary, he said reflects his belief that the debates will be won or lost not on policy points and mastery of details, which are Clintons strengths, but on the authenticity, boldness and leadership that the nominees demonstrate onstage.
In compiling research to help Clinton prepare, her advisers have cast a wide net. They contacted Tony Schwartz, the Art of the Deal co-author, to give them advice about Trump this summer even though Schwartzs 18-month immersion in Trumps life and homes ended in the mid-1980s. But Clinton advisers said Schwartz and other writers who had observed Trump up close, as well as unnamed psychology experts they had spoken to, were critical to understanding how to get under Trumps skin.
