Previewing a rancorous fall campaign, Hillary Clinton launched a full-throated attack Thursday on Donald Trump’s foreign policy as lurching toward war, international turmoil and economic crisis. She portrayed her own views as optimistic, inclusive and diplomatic, born from long experience in public life.
There was nothing diplomatic in her remarks, a clear indication of how she’ll take Trump on. Electing him, she said, would be “a historic mistake.”
During a speech in San Diego, the Democratic former secretary of state unloaded on her likely Republican presidential election opponent, counting down reasons he is not qualified – from his aggressive Twitter attacks to his emotional outbursts.
“He is not just unprepared; he is temperamentally unfit,” she told supporters in a ballroom. “We cannot let him roll the dice with America.”
She said a Trump presidency could lead the U.S. into war abroad, spark nuclear conflicts and ignite economic catastrophe at home.
“There’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf course deal, but it doesn’t work like that in world affairs,” Clinton said of the celebrity businessman. “The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels.”
She mocked Trump’s Twitter blasts and predicted he was preparing more as she spoke. As if on cue, he tweeted after she finished: “Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn’t even look presidential!”
Trump, meanwhile, got an endorsement he’d been seeking, from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had resisted even after the businessman clinched the GOP nomination.
Clinton’s robust assault on Trump also was widely carried on television, a change for the leading Democratic candidate who’s frequently struggled to break through coverage of Trump.
She is ramping up her criticism of the presumptive Republican nominee and trying to quell concerns within her own party that she isn’t ready to rumble with the famously combative Trump. Supporters have spent the past week assailing him on housing and veterans’ issues.
In Thursday’s speech, she offered a number of aggressive new attack lines, at times baiting Trump to respond by calling him “thin skinned.”
She hit Trump for his reality television past, for his snarky Twitter feed, for his hotel experience.
She ran down a list of people he has insulted, including the pope.
And she assailed Trump over many statements, criticizing him for seeking to ban Muslims from entering the country, for talking about leaving NATO and for suggesting Japan could one day acquire nuclear weapons.
“He has the gall to say prisoners of war like John McCain aren’t heroes,” Clinton said. “He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant.”