HILLARY CLINTON CAN DESTROY TRUMP. ALL SHE HAS TO DO IS GIVE HIM A HUG.

Everyone who can craft a sentence wants to stop Donald Trump.

No one seems to know quite how to do it.

Despite Trump’s apparent commitment to turn every female voter against him, he may go to the Republican convention with enough delegates to claim the nomination. And unless he can be unseated there, he can only be derailed when he is, in his view, at his best — in a debate with Hillary Clinton, his nearly inevitable opponent.

Clinton’s strength — her default — is policy and facts. I saw this close-up at a small White House dinner a few hours after Bill Clinton gave the interview in which he said “I did not have sex with that woman.” He was still wearing make-up. She looked pale. But when it was time for her remarks, she spoke about the reason we were there — to celebrate the citizens who had written checks to refurbish this room. She spoke anecdotally. Factually. Without notes. For fifteen fascinating, engaging minutes.

In a debate, that approach is a loser. Trump would, as he always does, ignore substance and go for the kill — he’d insult Clinton in ways so appalling that decent people will gasp.

But inside Donald Trump’s ego is a reservoir of low self-esteem begging to be exposed. Because his Republican opponents didn’t understand that, they attacked his strength — and were swatted away like gnats. Now Trump’s ego is yuge. It won’t require a career effort for Clinton, using a counter-intuitive strategy, to turn him into a pitiable, damaged, self-hating boy.

Her psychological attack should begin as soon as she and Trump walk onstage. At the start of Presidential debates, convention dictates that the candidates greet one another formally — with a handshake, and, in the case of the Obama-McCain and Obama-Romney debates, with a virtual embrace: a clasp of arms. Trump isn’t a germ freak at the level of Howard Hughes, but if you look at videos of him meeting his fans, you’ll see that he’s a hugger, not a shaker of hands. And ever since he suggested that Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly might have been menstruating during a debate, we know that he finds female biological machinery distasteful, if not outright disgusting. Shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, knowing where her hand has been, is sure to be uncomfortable for him.

At the first Obama-Romney debate, the ritual handshake and arm clasp lasted for five seconds. If Trump has to make physical contact with Clinton for five seconds, his disgust should be obvious. That’s great “gotcha” video. But what if she gave him a two-armed hug — a warm embrace — and, smiling, held him for ten seconds? Every woman who sees the distress on Trump’s face would know how to score that encounter: advantage, Hillary.

And she can build on that advantage.

Clinton has cast herself as a big-hearted policy wonk. She can’t abandon that without provoking fresh accusations that she lacks “authenticity.” But as every football coach knows, it’s important to confuse your opponent with different “looks” — quick changes in positioning at the line of scrimmage. Clinton’s task here is to add unanticipated shades to her character in order to pierce what has, so far, looked to be Trump’s impenetrable armor. To do that, she should draw upon cliché and use what retro males wrongly claim is women’s traditional signature weapon: feminine wiles.

It is completely against Clinton’s nature to bat her eyelashes and cheerfully defer to a man, but a mix of her characteristic mastery of data with uncharacteristic deference could be deadly. Consider how she might respond to a question about American companies that move jobs abroad. She could start with this: “It disturbs me to read that a plant in Indianapolis will close and 1,400 workers who make furnaces and heating equipment will lose their high-paying jobs to lower-paid workers in Mexico. It would be great to keep those jobs in America. But Carrier is just one division of United Technologies, a $56 billion company that receives $5.6 billion a year for military hardware from the federal government. For years United Technologies stock has been in a slump. Now Wall Street analysts are calling for a 15% increase in the stock price —and I imagine the owners of its 837 million shares would also like that.”

Then she should pivot: “I look at those conflicting interests and don’t see an easy or simple answer. But you’re a great businessman, Donald. You know how to get good deals. So I’d like to give you the rest of the time I have for this question and ask you to tell us what you’d do to help the workers, protect our military, make this company more successful —and keep those jobs in America.”

And she should do that on every question: offer a brief, factual answer that demonstrates her mastery of the complex and ambiguous components of important issues, and then, instead of waiting for the moderator to do it, flip the question to Trump as if she were an ante-bellum Southern hostess serving lemonade and cookies to a dashing gentlemen caller.

Trump can only strut his stuff when he’s in charge. But this counter-intuitive strategy has Clinton controlling an alpha male. Even if Trump grasps that he’s being set up, high-level deal making isn’t a skill he actually possesses. He won’t be able to school Clinton. He’ll be stressed. And as Warren Bennis, who knew a thing or two about leadership, has noted, “In moments of crisis, style dissolves into character.”

At the core of Trump’s character is narcissism, metastasizing hourly. His derision can become scorn, and scorn can become rage. And in that emotional furnace, Trump might implode and say something so blatantly obscene that he’ll finally cross some as-yet-unknown-but-fatal line. After that, any American who’s not an overt bigot will be too ashamed to support him. Publicly, anyway.

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” That line — Raymond Chandler wrote it in a detective novel — can be the coda of Trump’s long, sick story. He’s set the trap. Will Hillary Clinton spring it?