Exactly how many retired generals will it take to win the U.S. presidency in 2016?
On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced how 95 former generals and admirals have given the Democratic candidate their support.
Just a day prior, Donald Trump came up just a bit shorter when his campaign touted a letter signed by 88 former military leaders backing his presidential bid.
Those backing Trump indicated their opposition to Clinton stems mostly from a belief that she was “deeply involved with, and substantially responsible for, the hollowing out of our military” and that Trump would represent the “long-overdue course correction” the nation’s armed forces need. Specifically, their letter championed Trump’s “commitment to rebuild our military, to secure our borders, to defeat our Islamic supremacist adversaries and restore law and order domestically.”
So while Clinton slams Trump’s foreign policy for featuring Nixonian “secret plans” to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) and openly advocated torture, Trump attacks the former secretary of state as being “trigger-happy”—with a record to prove it.
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During a speech in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Trump seized on Clinton’s notoriously hawkish record—including her vote to invade Iraq in 2003, her leadership in the 2011 overthrow of the Libyan government, and her ongoing and highly problematic call to impose a no-fly zone in Syria—by saying that “sometimes it seems like there wasn’t a country in the Middle East Clinton didn’t want to invade.”
Attacking his credentials, meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to paint Trump as “unfit” to command the military and someone who would somehow bolster demonized foreign leaders like Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. “Trump’s policies are made even more terrifying,” argued the campaign, “by the casual attitude with which he looks at war—and by his refusal to ‘take any…cards off the table,’ including nuclear weapons.”
So while Clinton slams Trump’s foreign policy for featuring Nixonian “secret plans” to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) and openly advocated torture, Trump attacks the former secretary of state as being “trigger-happy”—with a record to prove it.
However, ahead of Wednesday night’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum” hosted by NBC News, the candidates’ respective efforts expose what critics are decrying as a bi-partisan race to the bottom on militarism, endless war, and reckless spending.
Though Trump—given his professional experience as a real estate developer and reality television star—lacks a tangible foreign affairs record and has no military experience to speak of, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t sparked intense worry among voters and policy experts with his rhetoric about bombing “the shit out of” perceived enemies or his casual talk about the use of nuclear weapons.
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