Hillary Clinton Seizes on Donald Trump’s Remarks to Galvanize Women

By AMY CHOZICK and MAGGIE HABERMAN

After Hillary Clinton attacked Donald J. Trump for proposing to bar Muslims from entering the United States, calling him “ISIS’ best friend,” Mr. Trump’s response Monday night was angry and vulgar. He said her bathroom break during Saturday’s Democratic debate was “disgusting,” and he used a crude sexual reference to describe her defeat by Barack Obama for the 2008 nomination.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides could barely believe their good fortune. Mr. Trump had just given them new fodder to galvanize women behind her candidacy — and they used it. “We are not responding to Trump,” Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, responded to Mr. Trump, almost gleefully, on Twitter. “But everyone who understands the humiliation this degrading language inflicts on all women should,” she added, tacking on the campaign’s girl-power hashtag #ImWithHer.

Behind the scenes, the Clinton campaign mobilized a wide network of female supporters to denounce Mr. Trump as “sexist,” as a practitioner of “pathetic, frat-boy politics,” and as more suited to running for “president of the fourth-grade football team.”

For months, Mrs. Clinton’s strategy was to hang Mr. Trump’s more outrageous pronouncements around the necks of other Republican contenders, seeking to portray the party’s entire field as extreme. But by going after Mr. Trump more assertively now than most of his Republican rivals have dared, Mrs. Clinton is projecting strength, and she is calculating that women, especially young voters, will reward her. In an interview with The Des Moines Register late Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Trump, “It’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism.”

Combativeness, after all, plays into Mrs. Clinton’s campaign theme: The blue “Hillary” signs that blanket her rallies carry the slogan “Fighting for us” in big block letters. But poking at Mr. Trump is not risk-free. He is unlike any rival Mrs. Clinton has confronted before, and has proved willing to say almost anything.

On Wednesday night, Mr. Trump posted a cryptic warning shot at Mrs. Clinton on Twitter. “Hillary, when you complain about a ‘penchant for sexism,’ who are you referring to,” he wrote. “BE CAREFUL.” On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton’s allies continued to join the fray: Emily’s List, which raises money for female candidates who support abortion rights, released an open letter calling on other Republican candidates to denounce Mr. Trump’s remarks.

“You have a chance to step up and do something about Donald Trump,” the letter read. “Most of you are, frankly, a lot smarter than he is. You at least know enough to try to hide your anti-woman policies behind the nice things you say about the women that you know.” The comments by Mr. Trump in Michigan on Monday night, and the Clinton campaign’s aggressive response, rattled some in the Republican Party, whose leaders urged candidates to show more sensitivity to women after Representative Todd Akin provoked ire in 2012 for referring to “legitimate rape.”

“It’s not O.K.,” said Katie Packer Gage, a Republican strategist whose firm, Burning Glass Consulting, focuses on improving the party’s standing with women. “Guess what?” she added. “It takes a girl longer to go to the bathroom because they can’t go standing up. Polite society suggests we don’t talk about these things.” The Clinton campaign’s emboldened new posture toward Mr. Trump grew from months of watching how his Republican rivals struggled to challenge him. While the other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination tread carefully to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump’s supporters, for Mrs. Clinton, hitting hard offers immediate benefits. It shows that she is unafraid of him, Democratic strategists said. And by focusing on Mr. Trump’s more extreme comments, Mrs. Clinton could excite the growing list of constituencies he has directly offended, as well as a broad range of voters who see Mr. Trump as a corrosive presence in the presidential campaign. “The contrast between her and Donald Trump could not be clearer,” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said after Saturday’s debate.

“The more Trump is out there,” he added, “the more these differences are clear, and what’s at stake for the middle class, both in the economy and in defeating ISIS.” Mrs. Clinton’s assertion in the debate that the Islamic State was “showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists” amounted to something of a turning point. Though journalists and Republicans found no evidence of such videos, Mrs. Clinton’s aides refused to take back her assertion. Mr. Trump, so often called on to admit to a falsehood or apologize, demanded a retraction from Mrs. Clinton. “Hell, no,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, replied. Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who heads a “super PAC” supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said she saw advantages in Mrs. Clinton’s failure to back up her assertion about militants using Mr. Trump’s comments as a recruitment tool. “Polls show a majority of Americans believe that Mrs. Clinton is not trustworthy,” Ms. Conway said. “Telling a lie feeds the fire and opens a new front in the character wars.” She added, “Swing voters won’t care that she took a bathroom break, but they will care that she seems willing to say anything to get elected.”

Republican candidates were quick to defend the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly after Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that she had been unfairly tough on him during a debate because she was menstruating. But so far, party insiders have mainly demurred from criticizing Mr. Trump’s latest boundary-breaking remarks, because publicly defending a Democratic rival, even if it appeases female voters, could prove problematic.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky even joined in the mockery. “Carly Fiorina has ZERO trouble making it back from commercial breaks,” he wrote in a Twitter post that Mrs. Fiorina, who has had her own run-ins with Mr. Trump’s gendered attacks, promptly retweeted.

Even some Democrats cautioned that Mrs. Clinton should not get carried away with combativeness toward Mr. Trump.

“Long term, we need to be careful of not unifying the Republicans” against Mrs. Clinton, said Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser to President Obama, “when they’re doing a good job of knifing each other.”