Just hours before the Brussels terrorist attack, Donald Trump was talking up his idea of scaling back U.S. ties to NATO, which is of course headquartered in Brussels. Just after the attack, Trump had more good ideas, reports the New York Times.
Indeed, within hours of seeing images of the carnage in Belgium, Mr. Trump renewed his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and for legalized torture to extract information from an Islamic State operative captured last week in Brussels.
Hillary Clinton, naturally, did just the opposite, taking swipes at Trump's NATO declaration and his chief prescription for fixing our immigration system.
“If we were to build a tall wall around the entire continental United States, the internet would still get over it.” In the afternoon, Clinton addressed a crowd in Washington state to say, “This morning is a reminder that we need a steady, smart, strong approach toward keeping us safe.”
Look, we all know that putting Trump in charge of our foreign policy in the current global context is like handing a child a loaded gun: one second he's snubbing our European allies, the next second he's resurrecting waterboarding or "a hell of a lot worse." The question is, how's it going to play with a public that's rattled as ISIS attempts to destabilize Europe?
Alex Seitz-Wald provides some insight into that question:
After the Paris attacks, Americans said they trusted Clinton to handle terrorism over Trump by 50-to-42 percent margin, according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll from October found voters were far more likely to say Clinton has the experience, temperament and skills to be president over Trump. [...]
But Trump is showing no signs that he sees foreign policy as a weakness.
“This is a subject that is very near and dear to my heart, because I’ve been talking about it, certainly much more than anybody else, and it’s why I’m probably No. 1 in the polls, because of the fact that I say we have to have strong borders,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”
The hope, of course, is that the voter trends in those polls will bear out with the general electorate (i.e. a more discerning audience than Trump's used to targeting). One recent piece of evidence to back that up was the reaction Trump got to his assertion earlier this week to the pro-Israel group AIPAC that he was the foremost expert on the Iran nuclear deal. Here’s Trump:
“I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me. And it’s a bad deal.”
If you watch the video, what you’ll hear is a lot of snickering after he tries to claim authority over the issue. Perhaps that’s a window into just how well his bluster is going to play in the general election.