Donald Trump responded to a letter signed by fifty national security experts and advisors who won’t vote for the GOP nominee by saying that he “hadn’t planned on using any of these people.”
“I wasn’t using any of them and they would have loved to have been involved with the campaign,” Trump said Tuesday morning in an interview on Fox Business, as reported by The Huffington Post. “Look at the terrible job they’ve done. I hadn’t planned on using any of these people.”
Trump dismissed the signees — a roster which includes high-profile figures such as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former CIA director Michael Hayden, and John Negroponte, the former Director of National Intelligence — as “Washington establishment people” who have left the United States a “mess” in terms of national defense.
“They don’t feel relevant because of that and they form a group and they go out and try to get some publicity for themselves and they hope that somebody else other than Trump wins because that way they can get a job,” he said.
The letter, originally reported Monday, slammed Trump as lacking “the character, values and experience to be president” and demonstrating “little understanding of America’s vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances, and the Democratic values on which U.S. foreign policy must be based.”
