See how serious Donald Trump is about the military? There are guns behind him!
Donald Trump had an aircraft carrier as a backdrop (though this one is now a museum, he wasn't wearing a flight suit, and there was no "mission accomplished" banner to be seen) and the friendly audience of a conservative dark money group fundraiser, but
does this surprise anyone?
Trump came here to give what was advance-billed by event organizers as a "major national security speech," though it clocked in at a lean 13 minutes and was again notably short on specifics.
But then, how much more specific does a Republican frontrunner need to be than that he'd privatize medical care for veterans and that "We’re gonna make our military so big and so strong and so great and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it. Nobody’s gonna mess with us"? If pressed on the specifics of which countries he would threaten to bomb, Trump could channel Sarah Palin on
which newspapers and magazines she reads: "Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."
Speaking of newspapers and magazines as relating to under-informed candidates, Trump has been a lot more specific than Palin about which newspapers and magazines he reads, and well he should be, since he says that's where he gets his foreign policy information and advice, telling CNN's Chris Cuomo:
I'm a man that's made a great fortune. I'm going to make our country rich. I'm going to make our country great, but you know what? You do -- get me the right generals, and I'll see four or five generals. I'll see all sorts of people. You'll even stoop down to the colonel staff. You go all over the place, but you have a lot of different people. And so do other shows. And they're really good people. And I watch that. And I read "The Times." And I read "The Wall Street Journal," and I'll read lots of other newspapers.
CUOMO: But you need a team.
TRUMP: And I read magazines, especially "TIME" magazine this week, because I'm on the cover. OK, special delivery (ph).
But I read magazines, and I read other things. Sure, I need a team. But you know, by the time you get to a problem, you know, we're talking a long ways away; it's going to be changed. You'll have a whole different set of -- different countries will be run by different people, in all fairness.
Come to think of it, if Trump's getting his information from CNN and TIME, a 13-minute speech seems about right for his depth of knowledge.