One factor surrounding the Clinton email scandal is none other than Donald Trump himself. You cannot analyze the rhetoric of this issue without analyzing Trump and his campaign’s role. In political campaigns, it is important to keep the focus off your own wrongdoing. The more accusations or bad press that come out about Trump, the more he seems to bash Hillary on the email scandal. His jabs have seemed to get rougher and rougher as he has gotten in deeper water. For example, Trump recently said:
“Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of corruption. She’s a corrupt person. What she’s done with her e-mails, what she’s done with so many things,” Trump said recently.
By portraying Hillary as corrupt, or as he has also been known to say “a nasty woman”, Trump is trying to switch the attention off of him and onto her. He continues to attack her on the issue. However, this strategy can only work for so long. Trump appeared to have over-used this attack-defense, until he came out in the second debate claiming:
“If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies so much deception” (see the full video here)
Trump took his counter-attack strategy one step further by claiming he will look further into having her held accountable for the issues intertwined in this email scandal and claiming that she has completely rigged the election. The main downside of his rhetorical strategy is that it also can turn people away from him because of his hateful words.
Whether you’re with her or with him, the rhetoric from both campaigns should be analyzed when addressing this issue. Just as often as Hillary has tried to pivot away from answering the tough email questions, Trump has continued to fuel the fire surrounding it. He will not let this go because it is his best strategy to distract the public from his own issues.
I agree with the main point of this post, as Trump has bee pushing hard to keep the heat on Clinton about her emails. I feel that as we get closer to election day that he will try one last big push to really attempt to nail Clinton on her email troubles. If you watch the debates every time one of his personal scandals comes up, he fires away about Clintons emails, and use it as his catalyst to proclaim she should be arrested. It makes for a very interesting exchange.
Trump has definitely been fueling the fire on HRC’s email controversy for a while now. It will be interesting to see what he’ll do in the next two weeks to really drive home the “untrustworthy” point. It’s pretty clear a good way to gain popularity with strong Trump supporters is to bring up the email controversy, so I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more of that as Trump encourages his people to get to the polls.