Hillary Clinton, seated in front of flags from the five branches of the military and flanked by different fighter jets, said on Wednesday that Donald Trump “does not seem to grasp” how to fight terrorism.
Clinton opened her military roundtable at the Virginia Air & Space Center here by questioning the proposals that Trump has announced in response to the terrorist attack in Orlando on Sunday that left 49 people dead.
“A ban on Muslims would not have stopped this attack. Neither would a wall,” Clinton said, referring to Trump’s plans to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. “I don’t know how one builds a wall to keep the Internet out.”
Clinton added, “Not one of Donald Trump’s reckless ideas would have saved a single life in Orlando. And it is just more evidence he is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be commander in chief.”
Clinton and her campaign has tried to turn Trump’s response to the Orlando terrorist attack — including an apparent suggestion that President Barack Obama has an ulterior motive concerning how he addresses and handles terror attacks — against the presumptive Republican nominee. On Tuesday in Pittsburgh, Clinton blasted the billionaire for peddling “lies” because “he has to distract us from the fact he has nothing substantive to say.”
Following the Orlando attack, Trump again proposed his plan to ban Muslim immigration into the United States and suggested that he would temporarily ban immigration from countries with terrorist ties. He also hit Clinton and Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“(Obama) doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. “It’s one or the other. And either one is unacceptable.”
Clinton on Wednesday said Trump has been “fixated” on the phrase radical Islam “as if those are magic words that, once uttered, will stop terrorists from coming after us.”
“His comments have becoming even more inflammatory in recent days,” Clinton said. “This approach isn’t just wrong, it is dangerous and I want to emphasize and underline this.”
And on Trump’s plan to respond to terrorism with immigration changes, Clinton labeled the presumptive nominee a hypocrite.
“That terrorist in Orlando was not born in Afghanistan as Trump claims,” Clinton said. “He was born in Queens, New York, only miles away from where Donald Trump himself was born.”
Clinton was introduced at the roundtable by Dorothy McAuliffe, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s wife. The Virginia governor is currently under federal investigation for campaign donations.