HILLARY’S FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH FOCUSES ON TRUMP’S INCOHERENT POLICIES

…A quote from Hillary’s foreign policy speech

 

Hillary’s best speech to-date seriously went after Donald Trump’s so called “foreign policies”.

 

Last week, Hillary Clinton did to “The Donald” what all of his primary opponents were unable to do in dealing with Trump’s outrageous claims as they were all fighting it out in the primaries.

 

Trump’s response to Hillary was very predictable, as instead of going after her with pertinent facts on foreign policy, he went after “Crooked Hillary” and her using a teleprompter for giving her speech.  As usual, Trump used personal slanderous accusations hurled at Hillary, without any real substance.

 

One of Trump’s surrogates later came on the scene to criticize Hillary’s foreign affairs speech saying that all she did was criticize Trump’s statements without giving her own policy positions.

 

But what Hillary was doing was using his own words to show how ridiculous Trump’s foreign policy statements have been, while her positions have been detailed on her web site for months. 

 

Hillary was using Trump’s own words on his support of dictators and tyrants, his ideas about encouraging Japan and Saudi Arabia to develop their own nuclear weapons and his contradictory statements about a number of issues, not to mention has anti-American attitude toward Hispanics and Muslims.

 

Yes, Clinton did not dive into the details of her own policies, but she instead focused on how she views Trump’s policy shortcomings.  Hillary framed the real estate magnate with contempt and serious mockery, and she rejected the basic tenet of his campaign: “that America is no longer great”.

 

At an evening rally later in San Jose, where there was a major confrontation between the pro & con Trump demonstrators, Trump called Clinton’s speech “pathetic” and “sad to watch.”  “It was a political speech that had nothing to do with foreign policy,” Trump said.

 

Actually, Hillary more than once made it clear in her speech that Trump has no regard for America’s strategic alliances across the globe and the role they play in keeping Americans safe.  It was all about foreign policy and how Trump’s “non-policies” would basically screw it up.

 

In one comment, Hillary made it clear that “Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them,” she said. “They’d love for us to elect a president who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”

 

If that’s not about foreign policy, then what was it?

 

Hillary dismissed Trump statements on subjects such as the NATO alliance and his threats from Russia and North Korea. She played back Trump’s assertions about climate change being a “hoax” which brought on some hearty laughs.

 

Mostly, Clinton presented closing arguments for why Trump should not be the leader of the world’s largest military and he should not be the caretaker of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. And she did so with biting sarcasm.  “This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes — because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,” she said.

 

Clinton also went after Trump’s “Twitter habit”, as if it were a drug addiction as she properly predicted that he would be using that social-media platform to attack her right then, during her speech.  “We all know the tools Donald Trump brings to the table: bragging, mocking, composing nasty tweets,” she said. “I’m willing to bet he’s writing a few right now.”  Which as it turned out, she was absolutely correct.  This was when the snide Tweets from Trump started appearing.

 

Unfortunately, Hillary did not mention the latest announcement about a small group of Hollywood stars, from Jon Stewart to Cher, that have said that they will be leaving the US, if Donald Trump is elected president.  Much of what Hillary offered in her speech was a list of the Trump reasons why that group of 10 well-known Hollywood celebrities have said they might have to leave the country.

 

Hillary was right on in her comments about Trump and his use of Twitter.  As she was speaking, Trump was sending a series of tweets, including: “Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn’t even look presidential!”  Talk about not being presidential!  Trump is acting like a 12 year old in the 7^th grade.

 

Not only was Trump wrong about Hillary’s speech not being about foreign policies, one by one, Clinton recited the long list of Trump’s statements on foreign policy issues.  Hillary’s campaign followed up afterward by blasting out more than three dozen distinct Trump quotations that Clinton had alluded to, with the subject line: “Trump Literally Said All Those Things.”

 

As usual, Trump followed her speech with insults and innuendos, but no facts.

 

“She’s one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of our country,” Trump said Wednesday at a campaign stop in Sacramento.  But he never gives an example of why she was, “one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of our country”.  Then he said, “Now she wants to be our president?  Look, I’ll be honest, she has no natural talent to be president.”

 

And once again, talk about not being appropriate for being the American president.

 

Hillary finally added, “He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U.” s

 

Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State may be a target for Trump, but Clinton rightly believes it is her shield. As Secretary of State, her approval rating hit an all-time high of 66%, according to a long-running Gallup poll.

 

Hillary’s campaign has offered a Web video highlighting a range of endorsements of her tenure at the State Department.  It included military and diplomatic figures, including President Obama.

 

President Obama, with the primaries still progressing, he has increasingly tiptoed into presidential politics in recent days.  But speaking in Elkhart, Ind., at a town-hall event hosted by PBS, the president excoriated Trump over foreign policy, echoing themes Clinton would later expound on in her San Diego speech the next day.

 

“He just says, ‘I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that?” Obama said. “What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

 

Not to be ignored, Senator Bernie Sanders later released a statement co-signing on Clinton’s critique of Trump, but Sanders sharply criticized her for not “thinking through the consequences” of her support for the Iraq War and for the regime change in Libya. “We need a foreign policy based on building coalitions and making certain that the brave American men and women in our military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East,” Sanders said.

 

Although she is widely expected to secure the Democratic nomination on the same day when five other states also hold primaries, a loss in California would highlight a central weakness for Clinton.  That being a lack of enthusiastic support from her party’s liberal base and young voters, the ones that are currently supporting Senator Sanders. 

 

Without those younger supporters, it could potentially hobble her as she enters the general election in earnest.

 

However, this approach of calmly using all of Donald’s own words against him in a way that those in the GOP primaries had failed to do, could this eventually be Trump’s Achilles Heel?

 

I guess, only time will tell.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016