Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton confronted their key weaknesses in a televised national security forum, with the Republican defending his preparedness to be commander in chief despite vague plans for tackling global challenges and the Democrat arguing that her controversial email practices did not expose questionable judgment.
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While the two traded barbs, neither candidate was on the stage with the other.
The Democratic nominee urged voters to weigh her readiness to be president not based on one decision but “on the totality of my record”.
Although she acknowledged that she had made a mistake in this regard, she emphatically denied that she received or sent classified emails because none of the messages contained the headers of “top secret, secret or confidential”. She also claimed that there was no evidence that her personal email accounts had been hacked.
One veteran, who noted that he had security clearances when he served in the military, underscored that he would have been prosecuted and imprisoned if he had done what she did.
Such answers did not do anything to dispel the notion of her untrustworthiness, which various polls have pointed out. “That is not my job, and I’m not going to be the election year pundit”.
On Tuesday night, Trump promised to convene his military commanders soon after taking office with “a simple instruction” aimed at the Islamic State group.
Clinton was on stronger ground – and appeared less defensive – dealing with foreign policy issues.
The discussion took place a little under three weeks before the first Presidential debate on September 26. Mr Trump played a strongman who is above mere details, declaring that under Mr Obama “the generals have been reduced to rubble” and that America has “the dumbest foreign policy”. Mrs Clinton’s hawkish instincts are honest: several times as Secretary of State from 2009-13, she was readier to use force as a tool of geopolitics than was her boss, Barack Obama.
While Clinton has had interactions with the press during this campaign, they haven’t typically resembled traditional press conferences.
Taking a handful questions from her traveling press corps behind a podium for the first time in more than 270 days, Clinton brushed off queries about why she wasn’t polling more strongly against Trump and whether she was bothered by what some have seen as a sexist slant in the coverage of her campaign.
Then it was trumps turn. “I was totally against the war in Iraq”, Trump told him. This sentiment is shared by a majority of Americans.
But Trump’s penchant for saying contradictory things and his ignorance of some foreign policies highlighted his own vulnerabilities.
Trump stood by a previous comment that appeared to blame military sexual assaults on men and women serving together, but added he would not seek to remove women from the military.
More alarmingly, he said one of the gravest mistakes coming out of the Iraq war was that the United States did not “take the oil”.
Sounding like an early 20th century imperialist, he lamented the disappearance of “to the victor go the spoils”.
He further talked about his so-called “bromance” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he repeatedly praised and cast as a better leader than Barack Obama.
Fifty-three percent of voters who are now serving or have previously served in the USA military said they would be confident in Trump’s ability to serve as an effective commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, while 47 percent of these voters said No, the NBC News/SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll has found.
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“I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin and a very good relationship with Russian Federation”.
