Hillary Clinton said Monday that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was the most dangerous presidential candidate in the history of the United States.
Clinton, in an interview with CBS News’ Charlie Rose, said Trump has “no self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any president should impose upon himself.”
After hitting Trump for advocating for a return to torture and killing the families of terrorists, Clinton said: “What he has laid out is the most dangerous, reckless approach to being president than I think we’ve ever seen.”
Rose, seemingly surprised by the comment, asked: “The most dangerous man ever to run for president of the United States?”
“I believe that,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s top campaign aides believe that the way to beat Trump in November is to not only stoke voters’ distrust of him, but to cast a vote for him as a vote for putting the United States in danger. The goal is to convince voters that Trump is unprepared and unfit for the job.
In an ABC News poll released this week, 60% of voters said Trump was not qualified to be president, 37% said he was qualified. Clinton had the near inverse of those numbers: 59% said she was qualified, while 39% said she was not.
Yet polls also show Clinton in a close race with the presumptive Republican nominee.
Clinton’s explanation for that: “The campaign is really just starting.”
“There is a lot of fear in our country. And when Americans are worried they’re looking for answers. He’s providing simplistic, easy answers,” Clinton said, adding that she intends to speak to those concerns by offering “a very clear sense of what we can do that will actually produce results, not just demagogic rhetoric.”
