Tampa, Florida: Leaning heavily on her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton assailed Donald Trump’s national security credentials on Tuesday, portraying him as a bungling businessman unequipped to serve as commander in chief.
“He says he has a secret plan to defeat ISIS [Daesh]. The secret is, he has no plan,” Clinton said in a blistering speech here dripping with ridicule directed at her Republican rival.
Clinton repeatedly referred to her experiences as the nation’s top diplomat — and enlisted her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, to do the same in his first national security address — to draw a contrast with Trump.
Clinton’s emphasis on her experience in global stagecraft comes a week after Trump tried to bolster his foreign policy credentials with a trip to Mexico. Clinton called the trip “an embarrassing international incident.”
“He got into a Twitter war with the president of Mexico,” she added, alluding to Enrique Pena Nieto. “He is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president of the United States.”
Trump, in turn, addressed Clinton’s own qualifications at an event in Virginia Beach. Asked if questions about Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state made her unfit to serve as commander in chief, Trump replied with a quip.
“It’s such a long answer to that question,” he said to laughter. “Could go on for days.”
Trump will also use a speech on Wednesday in Philadelphia to call for the end of the military sequester as a way to increase defence spending, according to a senior adviser who spoke anonymously in order to discuss campaign strategy. The speech is also intended to contrast Clinton’s foreign policy vision — which Trump described Tuesday night as “military adventurism” — with what he says is a more cautious approach.
On Wednesday night, Clinton and Trump will answer questions in a televised forum on national security hosted by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
In a preview of what she might say during the forum, Clinton recalled on Tuesday the tense 2011 decision in the White House Situation Room to send a team of Navy SEALs to raid a compound in Pakistan believed to be harbouring Osama Bin Laden.
“Would it be a missile strike? Would it be a bombing? Would it be an attack?” she said, quieting the crowd. “I was one of the ones who said I thought it was worth the risk,” she said as a woman in the audience shouted, “You go, girl!”
The renewed emphasis on national security coincided with news that 88 retired generals and military officials had released an open letter endorsing Trump, saying his presidency would bring a “long overdue course correction in our national security posture.”
Asked at a news conference about the endorsements, Clinton pretended to brush them off. “I think 88 flag officers?” she said. “I think we’re up to 89, but who’s counting?”
She added that Trump’s military endorsements fell far short of the 300 to 500 endorsements the past two Republican nominees, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Mitt Romney, had received.
“I’m doing better than any Democrat” in racking up military endorsements, she said. “He’s doing worse than any Republican.”
With nine weeks until the election, a recent CNN/ORC poll shows that Trump has gained ground against Clinton so they are essentially tied nationally among likely voters. The poll found that Trump held a 51 to 45 per cent edge over Clinton on the question of whom voters trust to handle terrorism, although she holds a solid lead on the issue of whom voters trust on foreign policy.
The focus on national security came as President Barack Obama’s trip to Asia hit several diplomatic snags, intensifying Republican criticism of the White House’s approach to foreign policy.
Clinton defended Obama’s cool response after a heated dispute over the stairs he would use to depart from Air Force One when he arrived in Hangzhou, China, for the Group of 20 Summit meeting on Saturday.
“Trump said if there had been the kerfuffle about the stairs and the press, he would have just stayed on the plane and gone home,” she said, seeking to portray Trump as a petulant child, while citing her own dealings with China during her time at the State Department.
“You don’t get in a snit and stay on your plane and go home,” she said. “You get off the plane and you go to work.”
Obama also cancelled a planned meeting in Laos with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines after Duterte used a slur to describe Obama. Duterte later apologised.
Regarding the Philippines, Clinton said, “President Obama made exactly the right choice.”
On Monday, she accused Russian agencies of interfering in the US election through cyberattacks that would help Trump, whose potential presidency, she said, would destabilise the US and delight foreign adversaries.
Clinton made Trump seem uncaring about the US military, pointing to his criticism of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son was killed in Iraq, and she also faulted how his private enterprises had treated veterans.
“Trump companies have fired veterans because they have to take time off to fulfil their military commitments,” she said.
But as Clinton tried to stoke fears in voters about Trump’s preparedness to serve, it was Kaine who delivered the argument in personal terms.
Standing in front of 18 American flags at a former USO facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, Kaine talked about his son Nat, 26, a Marine deployed in Europe.
“I trust Hillary Clinton to make these decisions with full knowledge that the life of my son and his friends may be riding on the outcome,” Kaine said.
“Donald Trump as commander in chief,” he added, “scares me to death.”
