The Republican presidential nominee raised issues on Tuesday night about his Democratic rival’s policy of “military adventurism” and home brew server to a capacity crowd that chanted “lock her up”.
Trump’s assault on Clinton, in a cavernous convention center, marked his first public rally since the Labor Day, the unofficial kickoff to the fall campaign. After bemoaning that Clinton didn’t talk about policy but instead engaged in “hitjobs” against him, Trump proceeded to return the favor. Only hours before, at a Tampa rally, Clinton had called him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president of the United States”.
At a town hall earlier on Tuesday, Trump criticized the United States’ intervention in Libya as part of Nato in 2011. There, he said “this was a Hillary Clinton deal. We could have had a minor attack.” The Republican nominee supported the intervention at the time.
The attack on Clinton’s interventionist foreign policy came the night before Trump will hold a major address on defense policy in Philadelphia. He is expected to call for the end of the sequester and a significant increase in military spending. He is also expected to condemn Clinton’s foreign policy of regime change and democracy promotion as well.
In addition to policy, Trump used much of his speech to give a fervent indictment of the ongoing controversy of Clinton’s emails, which he said was “worse than Watergate”. In his view, “we can’t have someone in Oval Office who doesn’t know meaning of words ‘confidential’ or ‘classified.’”
The Republican nominee condemned Clinton’s use of the software BleachBit to wipe her servers – “she bleached her emails” – and raised questions about a Clinton aide destroying her discarded phones with a hammer. “Who uses 13 different iPhones in 4 years,” Trump asked. “The only people who use that many phones are usually involved in very, very, I mean very, shady activity.”
As Trump summed it up: “In history there has never been a situation like what’s going on with Justice and Hillary Clinton. There has never been a situation like what’s going with the media and Hillary Clinton.”
Trump also continued to compare Hillary Clinton to German chancellor Angela Merkel, calling her “America’s Merkel” and saw parallels to her fortunes in Merkel’s party losing regional elections in Germany on Sunday. “See what happened to Angela Merkel, they had a massive defeat recently in the elections.”
Trump did outline one new policy detail at the rally. The Republican nominee pledged that, if elected, “I am also going to notify all countries that refuse to take back dangerous illegal immigrants that they will lose access to our visa programs and many more little goodies.” Losing access to US visa program would effectively mean that residents of those countries would not be able to visit the United States for any reason.
He tied the issue to risk from immigrants committing crimes, in particular Syrian refugees whom he once again called “a Trojan Horse”. Unusually, Trump thought about history in expressing his concern about a potential threat from those fleeing the Syrian civil war. “In 200 years, 400 years, I don’t want people to be reading about it or talking about it,” said Trump.
The Republican nominee also pledged that he would have the US military submit a plan to defeat Isis within 30 days of taking office. This marked a shift from his statement in May 2015, before he formally announced his candidacy, that he already had a plan to defeat Isis but that he wanted to keep it secret because: “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing.”