At almost every election, the political establishment tries to paint opponents as puppets of the Russian president. It never works.

Cast your mind back to the EU referendum. Amid what was dubbed ‘Project Fear’, there were consistent warnings from the Remain campaign that Brexit would embolden Russian president Vladimir Putin. And all I kept thinking was, do they really think people are that bothered?

As it turned out, Putin was absolutely bottom of the list of voters’ concerns, if they were concerned about him at all. However, Putin supporting Brexit was at least plausible, even if he vehemently denied the claim after the result, calling it ‘a show of low level of political culture’.

Across the Atlantic however, Putin doesn’t seem to be just one component of Hillary Clinton’s strategy, he appears to be her obsession.

After Nigel Farage’s visit to Mississippi to support Trump, she said in a speech that Trump, Farage, right-wing news platform Breitbart and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones were themselves all part of a conspiracy masterminded by Vladimir Putin.

If she was running against anyone other than Donald Trump I’d say it’s the wackiest thing you’ll hear all election. Alex Jones himself might want to consider giving her a job on his site Infowars.com.

It then got even wackier when she added the Ku Klux Klan to the mix in a new campaign ad.

At some point she should stop to ask herself one question. Who is this rhetoric supposed to appeal to? Gun-toting, Reagan-era Cold Warriors are no doubt suspicious of Russia, but they’re much more concerned right now about ISIS. And ironically Putin is the kind of macho figure leading the fight against ISIS that would appeal to Trump voters.

Establishment figures like Hillary seem to think that this dumbed-down rhetoric of, for example, likening Putin to Hitler is what appeals to working class voters. But in reality there is no better example of the elite talking to themselves.

That’s before we get into the fact that Hillary, while trying to make the election about Putin, has a very big ISIS problem. Donald Trump has accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of being the founders of ISIS, and not totally without foundation.

After all it was when Hillary was Secretary of State that the United States flooded Syrian rebel groups, many of whom morphed into ISIS, with weapons. And it was Hillary that convinced Barack Obama to support a Libya intervention he was sceptical about, which ultimately handed large swathes of the country to ISIS.

If, rather than tackling these attacks from Trump head on, Hillary wants to try to match them with accusations that the Republican candidate is in cahoots with Putin, there is only going to be one winner.

‘Putin’s puppet’ or the ‘founder of ISIS’? Even for voters who despise the Russian president, it’s like asking if you would rather step on a tack or be thrown into a pool of molten lava.