After being criticized for asking Hillary Clinton about her emails during an NBC presidential candidate forum on Wednesday, NBC’s Matt Lauer concluded his interview with Donald Trump with a rather rote question.
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“The man has very strong control over a country”, Trump said. In the back-to-back question and answer, Matt Lauer was seen as being particularly hard on Hillary Clinton.
Some believe he was even grilling her about her email controversy. She also flushed out several national security priorities if she is elected, including trying to take out the leader of the Islamic State and vowing to defeat the extremist group without putting USA troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria.
Trump remained persistently vague about his plans for defeating the Islamic State group, insisting that he privately has a blueprint for taking on the terror group but wanted to remain “unpredictable”.
Trump levied unusual criticism against America’s military leaders, saying the generals have been “reduced to rubble” during President Barack Obama’s administration. “It’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader”.
Clinton, who has cast Trump as dangerously ill-prepared to be commander in chief, tried to center the discussion on her foreign policy proposals should she win in November. According to notes released from Clinton’s interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she said she relied on others with knowledge about handling classified files. “I find it frustrating, but it’s part of the landscape we live in”.
In the meantime, check out the Truth-O-Meter records of Trump and Clinton side by side.
Some of those Republicans will join Clinton Friday for what she dubbed at “working session” on the threat of terrorism.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton poses for a photo with supporters at a rally at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fla., Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016.
The event is not related to the three presidential debates, with the the first of those scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in NY. The candidates will face off for the first time on September 26 at Hofstra University.
By virtue of a coin flip, Clinton took the stage first. He’s zeroed in on her controversial email practices at the State Department, calling her private email server “reckless”. But she defended her support for USA military intervention to help oust a dictator in Libya, despite the chaotic aftermath. “I was totally against the war on Iraq”.
The Republican nominee also stood behind a 2013 tweet in which he raised the idea of separating men and women in the military to reduce sexual assaults. Meanwhile Trump again praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, and continued a streak of shifting statements on immigration by saying he was open to letting undocumented immigrants who want to serve in the military stay in the U.S.
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“I have a very substantial chance of winning”, he said.
