Wednesday night’s town hall comes as Mr. Trump is enjoying a massive lead over Mrs. Clinton among veterans and active-duty military, polls have shown, an advantage that has held steady throughout the general election campaign despite an intense effort to discredit the Republican billionaire on foreign policy issues. On Wednesday Trump also said, “If he [Putin] says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him”.
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But Trump stood by a 2013 tweet that implied military sexual assault is a result of women serving in the military, when asked by Lauer. “I will do everything in my power to make sure that our men and women in the military are fully prepared for any challenge that they may have to face on our behalf”. “There are many people that think that that’s absolutely correct.it’s happening, right?”
Trump, meanwhile, sharply criticized the military’s top leaders, saying their ranks have been “reduced to rubble” under the Obama administration and that the military “is very sadly depleted”. The Republican also said that, if elected, he would give military leaders 30 days to formulate a multipronged plan to defeat the Islamic State.
Trump told Lauer he “was totally against the war in Iraq” in 2002.
Lauer asked: “But you have your own plan?”
“I have a lot of experience dealing with classified material”, Clinton said, referring to her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee and her tenure at the State Department.
“I have a substantial chance of winning, but if I win I don’t want to broadcast” the plan, Trump said. She said none of e-mails she sent or received had a header denoting a high level of classification.
“And we’ve got to do it with air power”.
“Permitting there to be an ongoing civil war in Libya would be as threatening and as unsafe as what we are seeing in Syria”, she said. “We have to squeeze them by continuing to support – the Iraqi military”.
It was the first time the candidates had appeared back-to-back at an event since they secured their parties’ nominations, and the evening offered a preview of their first debate on September 26.
“I’m asking to be judged on the totality of my record”, said Clinton, who grew visibly irritated at times with the repeated focus on her past actions.
But Clinton defended certain emails, including information about the country’s covert drone program, as not revealing classified information. She also said “we did not lose a single American in that action”, glossing over the fact that four Americans were killed in 2012 at the USA diplomatic outpost in Benghazi and giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to pounce. One of the first complaints was made by Charles Johnson of the blog Little Green Footballs, who said Clinton was “constantly” interrupted by Lauer while Republican candidate Donald Trump never was.
It bears mentioning that Trump vice presidential pick Mike Pence strongly supported the Iraq War – he co-sponsored and voted in favor of the bill authorizing the Iraq War when he was a House representative from in, and opposed measures to set a timeline to withdraw troops.
“I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously, always have, always will, ‘ she said”.
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Trump said at the forum that he’d be open to “working” a way for undocumented immigrants to serve in the U.S. military – a sharp contrast to his tone during a speech in Arizona last week where he said he would focus on deporting undocumented immigrants from the country.
