In one of the most striking speeches of her political career, Clinton dispensed with the sober diplo-speak that has characterized her previous national security addresses and went straight for the jugular, unleashing a series of biting attacks on Trump. I can tell you that, folks.
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Clinton turned her fire toward Trump even as she is still consumed with her primary battle in California against Vermont Sen.
He called her speech “pathetic” and said it “had nothing to do with foreign policy”. Reading poorly from the telepromter! “She doesn’t even look presidential!” Just 40 percent say they like Trump.
Trump is responding, “My temperament is so much tougher, so much better than hers”.
She spoke at UC Riverside on May 24, hours after Democratic rival Bernie Sanders had done so as well.
Clinton’s comments came in a foreign policy speech that held her most blistering criticism to date of the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Her top aide, Cheryl Miller, has testified recently that the former First Lady did not go through the process that should make her private server accessible through the Freedom of Information Act.
In tweets and a speech later, Mr. Trump scorned his Democratic opponent, calling her “Crooked Hillary”, and ‘Lying Hillary.’ Mr. Trump said her speech was “pathetic”, “had nothing to do with foreign policy”, and promised to expose her lies in the coming weeks.
Appearing on MSNBC, former Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich cautioned that Hillary Clinton is going to need to do something to attract Bernie Sanders’ voters if she has any chance to beat Donald Trump, whom he called the “most risky presidential candidate we’ve had”.
Clinton is nearly certain to clinch the Democratic nomination just before polls close in the state, but a defeat in the largest contest in the country would be an embarrassing final scene to her historic primary win.
She’ll attack him back harder.
Clinton and Trump are all-but assured to be nominated as the Democratic and Republican candidates.
One of the arguments that the Sanders campaign is making to those superdelegates is a side-by-side comparison of how Sanders fares compared to Clinton in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup against Trump.
“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes”, she said about Trump. Clinton has a long track record of foreign policy failures during her tenure as secretary of state – the failed Russian reset, the murder of the USA ambassador and three Americans in Benghazi, regime change in Libya and Syria – which played a role in the rise of Islamic extremism in the region – and how she helped drive Iran to the negotiating table for the disastrous Iran deal.
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Clinton is capitalizing on Trump’s struggle to explain multiple contradictions and gaps in the foreign policy vision he has laid out.
