Trump had previously dubbed Texas Senator Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted”.
Advertisement
If Clinton plans to avoid those same mistakes, she now has the message she needs in hand.
Trump criticized the speech on Twitter on June 2 without directly addressing Clinton’s accusations that he is unfit for the presidency.
To be sure, Clinton will face tough questions in the months ahead about her own foreign policy record.
Democrats have something else that wakes them up screaming in the middle of the night: the prospect that the Federal Bureau of Investigation will recommend charges against Clinton or her aides when it completes its own probe.
Hillary Clinton speaks at a “Women for Hillary” event in Culver City, California. At first, Trump called her speech “sad” and so boring that it almost put him to sleep.
We must “condemn all violence in the political arena”, Clinton said. “Others have looked, but no one else – including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker – has been able to find any evidence to support his claims, either”.
Clinton’s robust assault on Trump was widely carried on television, a change for the leading Democratic candidate who’s frequently struggled to break through coverage of Trump.
That might help explain why Clinton mostly focused on attacking Trump’s temperament and character, rather than his overall foreign policy philosophy.
But Sanders is also calling out the former secretary of state for her past history in worldwide affairs.
Trump “doesn’t understand America or the world”, she said. He said they should now consider the enthusiasm of his crowds and how well he is doing in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump as a sign that his campaign is strongest. Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is fighting her for the state’s 475 delegates that will be divvied up on Tuesday. “It might say more than it means if Sanders were to win it”, said John Burton, chairman of the California Democratic Party.
In another tweet, Trump added: “Crooked Hillary no longer has credibility – too much failure in office”. Reading poorly from teleprompter!
The rest of the time was telling us about all her many self-proclaimed successes and ending with how she and President Obama were responsible for killing Usama bin Laden.
Perhaps just as importantly, she matched Trump on belittling insults, just to let him know she can. Yesterday an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll showed pro-abortion Sanders pulling within two points of Clinton in the California presidential primary among likely Democratic voters. “People will not allow another four years of incompetence!”
In New Jersey on Wednesday, Clinton hammered Trump over the legal controversy surrounding his now-defunct Trump University, labeling him a “fraud”.
He has proven a maddeningly elusive target for Republicans and Democrats alike.
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.
“People are very nervous”, said one senior USA security official.
She cast Trump as dangerously thin-skinned, someone who might plunge the nation into war over a perceived slight. And she praised President Barack Obama’s agreement with Iran, concluding that: “We are safer now than we were before this agreement”.
Yesterday, Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid said of his colleague’s bid, “Sometimes you just have to give up”.
Speaking directly about Trump’s comments about the possibility of open warfare on the Korean peninsula, Clinton said: “I wonder if he even realizes he’s talking about nuclear war?”
Yet the strategy has its risks, as pretty much all of Trump’s GOP primary rivals who tried to take on Trump couldn’t survive his return fire. He was lamely trying to defend a column he’d written basically writing off all the substantive criticisms there are of the former Secretary of State.
Advertisement
She contrasts that with Trump’s vision of a “fearful America” that she says would be less secure and less engaged in the world.
