Hillary Clinton cast Donald Trump as a loose cannon incapable of articulating a coherent national security vision during a Tuesday rally in Tampa, Florida.
“He’s very loose in his talks about nukes,” Clinton said. “He says he doesn’t care if other countries get them, doesn’t know why they haven’t been used already. I mean, it’s so mind-boggling when I hear these things I say ‘That can’t be true.’ And then they replay it for me again.”
“He says he has a secret plan to defeat Isis but the secret is he has no plan,” she went on, to cheers from the University of South Florida audience. “After all his talk the only thing that is clear is he has no clue about what he’s talking about.”
The former secretary of state ran through a lengthy list of other foreign policy blunders Trump had made on the campaign trail, including attacking the family of a Muslim soldier killed in the Iraq War and claiming that he knows more about defeating the Islamic state terror group “than the generals do.”
Clinton urged Trump to “look at a map” before making statements about allowing Syria to be overtaken by ISIL fighters.
She framed a Trump presidency as a risk to international diplomacy, noting that the Republican nominee recently got caught up in a Twitter fight with the president of Mexico over whether the two leaders discussed who would fund his signature U.S.-Mexico border wall during a meeting last week.
“Rather than work with our allies, he chooses to insult them,” Clinton said, calling Trump “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president.”
The Democratic nominee pledged to provide a measured and clearly laid out foreign policy plan that would contrast with her Republican opponent’s.
“We’ll stand up to our adversaries, not cozy up to them,” she said. “We’re going to have real plans, not claims and secret plans.”
While Clinton spoke in Tampa, Trump held a town hall in Virginia Beach where he accused her and the Obama administration of turning Iran into a dangerous “world power” through the 2015 nuclear deal.
