Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.
Well, that didn’t take long, did it?
“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”
And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.
Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”
“If we would’ve done nothing,” Trump argued, “we would’ve been in much better shape.”
Awesome! If Hillary is the nominee, the Democratic candidate will be more right wing on foreign policy than the GOP nominee and dangerous buffoon, Donald Fucking Trump! I implore anyone in a state that has not yet voted to think about this sad state of affairs and do something about it.
And Trump may be an insane liar, but sadly he is spot on with this criticism of Hillary.
Clinton has made herself vulnerable to this kind of criticism. She did in fact enthusiastically vote for the Iraq War. She also spearheaded the Obama administration’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, now supports a “no-fly zone” in Syria, and has aligned herself with Gulf State monarchies and Israel’s extremist right-wing leadership.
Is this really the candidate that you want to be defending going into the general election?
Trump’s isolationist posturing, however dubious it might be, has triggered a neoconservative flight from the presumptive Republican ticket while repositioning the Democrats, if led by Clinton, as the war party.
After spending the last several months casting herself as a progressive to compete with Bernie Sanders, Clinton now appears to be recalibrating to appeal to disaffected Republicans.
Clinton’s supporters, for example, are tapping Bush family megadonors for campaign cash.
And the Clinton campaign is proudly boasting a growing list, constantly updated, of establishment Republicans who have either refused to vote for Trump or have openly defected to Clinton.
Neoconservatives feature prominently on this list, including the Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, Iraq war architect Elliott Abrams and Republican foreign policy advisor Max Boot. (Boot officially endorsed Clinton on Sunday.)
There is still time to stop this crazy train. Please vote for Sanders if you still have the opportunity. Otherwise, be prepared for a long depressing general election campaign of more of this:
“Donald Trump will be running to the left as we understand it against Hillary Clinton on national security issues,” Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said on MSNBC last week. “And the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.”