Hillary Clinton is on the attack – and after lambasting Sanders she is going for Trump

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We’re off. With Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy broadside last week against a certain Manhattan property magnate, the US’s general election campaign began.

She didn’t get into personal mudslinging – a pursuit at which no one will ever best Donald Trump. Instead she stuck to policy, an area in which no one bests Hillary Clinton. In reality, this wasn’t a foreign policy speech in the usual sense, when the candidate sets out her own. It was a shredding of Trump’s – which, she said, consisted of “not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and lies". And it surely pointed the way forward for the Clinton campaign over what promise to be five of the foulest political months in modern US history: showing Americans what her opponent stands for.

Diehard Trumpers, of course, are impervious to this sort of thing: if anything, each new word of criticism only increases their devotion. But others who are wondering whether to support him, people who also believe a bomb should be put under the dysfunctional status quo, aren’t sure that Trump is the proper person for the job. These are the voters he needs to win in November, and they are not impervious.

Why this particular speech now, you may wonder? After all, isn’t she supposed to be focussing on Tuesday’s make-or break California primary against Bernie Sanders? Couldn’t the Trump stuff have waited? In fact the primary may be neck and neck, but it isn’t make or break.

Yes, she may lose. But barring an utterly improbable Sanders landslide, the proportional system used by the Democrats to allocate delegates to July’s convention means that a narrow victory for the self-proclaimed socialist would have scant impact on her lead in pledged delegates. As for the unpledged superdelegates on whom Sanders ostensibly pins his hopes, these are Democratic party notables.

Sanders wasn’t even a Democrat until recently (if he considers himself one even now; why should they abandon Clinton, even on the basis of polls showing that he, Sanders, would do better than her in a November match-up with Trump?

If such polls dictated matters, John Kasich (remember him?) would today be the presumptive Republican nominee. As it is, by winning others of the remaining contests, notably in New Jersey, which votes the same day as California, she will probably have mathematically locked up the nomination even before results come in from the West Coast.

To be sure, defeat in the most populous state in the country would be an embarrassment, underscoring her well-known deficiencies as a candidate and emboldening Sanders to carry his campaign to the July convention. But no more than that. Back in 2008, Clinton defeated the eventual winner Barack Obama in the same California primary, and much good it did her. In reality, apart from a Bernie landslide, the only thing that can derail her is an indictment arising from the FBI investigation of her State Department emails. If that happens, obviously all bets are off.

In this light, her broadside against Trump makes sense. He is the main enemy now, not Sanders. For weeks he’s been lambasting Clinton. Now she’s finally starting to mount some serious return fire, while reminding California voters of her strongest selling point: her experience, above all in foreign policy.

During the primaries, it was different. Obliged to depict Obama and Hillary as the main enemies, Trump’s Republican opponents pretty much gave a free pass to his outrageous statements and posturing. Sometimes they even went further. Not so Clinton now. And for all her flaws as a campaigner, she can look after herself, above all against Republicans who tend to lose their mental bearings when the very word Clinton comes up.

Trump has had his good moments these past few days; from the scathing State Department inspector’s report on Clinton’s use of a private email server to the endorsement (or, more accurately perhaps, abject surrender) of the House Speaker Paul Ryan, ensuring a façade, at least, of party unity. But they’ve been more than matched by the bad moments.

One has been deliciously apt – the decision of the PGA tour to move its prestigious World Golf Championship from a Trump-owned course in Miami to (guess where?) Mexico City. Officially, the problem was sponsorship: few companies would risk spending millions to promote their brand when they would go up against brand Trump, arguably the best known in the world right now.

More to the point, what global company wants to be associated with a man who fulminates against Mexicans and Muslims? Trump called the PGA decision “a sad day for Miami, the United States and the game of golf", before adding: “I hope they have kidnapping insurance.”

Much more serious is the court case over Trump University, offering expensive courses on the great man’s business techniques to would-be property investors. Some had naively expected Trump to tone down his rhetoric and act “more presidential” after he had secured the delegates to win the nomination. Not a bit of it.

Last week, he broke off a campaign speech to launch a protracted, racially tinged attack against the judge in the case, a son of Mexican immigrants, after the latter ordered the release of embarrassing internal university documents, in which some former employees called the venture a fraud and a rip-off. Whatever the outcome, the controversy is bound to continue – a Republican version of Clinton’s email problems. And now his likely opponent’s evisceration of what passes for a Trump foreign policy.

In March, after 120 members of the Republican national security establishment published an open letter opposing a Trump presidency and (like Clinton) called him “utterly unfitted to the office.” Trump responded by unveiling his own team of foreign policy advisers. Virtually no-one had ever heard of any of them, and not a squeak has been heard from them since.

Now we’re back where we started, with schoolyard tweets against his opponent, featuring favoured Trump epithets such as “lousy", “pathetic" and “loser", but 140 character-long jibes are no substitute for a foreign policy. But that, it seems, is what we’re going to get, and Hillary Clinton will make hay.