Trump's 'thin skin' would set off war or economic crisis, Clinton warns

Hillary Clinton delivered a lacerating rebuke Thursday of her likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, declaring that he was hopelessly unprepared and temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief. Electing him, she said, would be a "historic mistake."

Speaking in a steady, modulated tone but lobbing some of the most fiery lines of her presidential campaign, Clinton painted Trump as a reckless, childish and uninformed amateur who is playing at the game of global statecraft.

"This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes," she said, "because it's not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin."

Clinton, whose campaign had grappled for weeks over how to handle Trump, seemed to find her footing as she addressed an audience in San Diego that laughed and cheered as she deconstructed Trump's foreign policy pronouncements, calling them "not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies."

The speech, which interlaced biting sarcasm and somber assessments of foreign crises of the Obama years, unfurled what is likely to be the core argument Clinton will carry into the general election.

She said she imagined Trump "composing nasty tweets" about her as she spoke. And, indeed, he was: "Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from teleprompter! She doesn't even look presidential," he wrote.

But Clinton sought to turn Trump's prolific Twitter habit into an additional bullet point demonstrating that he was unfit for the presidency, as she put it. She twice referred to the scene in the White House Situation Room where, as secretary of state, she advised Obama on the 2011 raid on a compound in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

"Imagine Donald Trump sitting in the situation room, making life or death decisions on behalf of the United States," Clinton said, eliciting cries of "No!" from her audience. "Imagine if he had more than his Twitter account at his disposal when he's angry, but America's entire arsenal."

In an interview during Clinton's speech, Trump called her performance "terrible" and "pathetic." He added: "I'm not thin-skinned at all. I'm the opposite of thin-skinned."

For Clinton, whose formal speeches tend to be earnest and laden with dutiful policy prescriptions, it was striking departure — a rollicking political indictment that doubled as Clinton's first full-blooded response to Trump's drumbeat of criticism about her ethics and judgment during a quarter-century in public life.

The speech came after weeks of study by Clinton aides to determine which attacks by Trump's Republican rivals had not worked. It was studded with punch lines: Trump "doesn't have a clue what he's talking about," Clinton said at one point. "Donald doesn't see the complexity," she said at another. "This isn't reality television," she said of a Trump presidency. "This is actual reality."

After her campaign had initially issued a tepid response to Trump's proposal of defaulting on the national debt, calling the idea "risky," Clinton said Thursday such action would lead to "an economic catastrophe."

"He believes we can treat the U.S. economy like one of his casinos," she said.

"He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia," Clinton said. "There's no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf course deal."

In vivid strokes, Clinton framed not just her case against Trump but the broader foreign-policy debate in the election: She cast herself as the defender of an American-led world order against an insurgent who did not understand, let alone respect, the network of alliances the United States constructed after World War II to safeguard its interests.

Clinton presented herself as a sure-footed commander in chief, a fervent believer in America as an exceptional country, tested by her time in the Situation Room. She highlighted her ability to go "toe to toe" with leaders in Beijing and Moscow, contrasting that to what she said was Trump's "bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America."

"I'll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants," she said, smiling, to applause. "I just wonder how anyone could be so wrong about who America's real friends are."

Even as she excoriated Trump, Clinton kept a close eye on domestic politics. She noted, for example, that she understood the deep qualms voters had with trade deals. Still, Trump's threats to impose tariff on Chinese imports, Clinton said, would set off a trade war of the kind that deepened the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Clinton recited a handful of highlights from her time at the State Department, including her role in brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in 2012 and rallying the world to impose sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. But she failed to flesh out her proposals for dealing with the Islamic State or the civil war in Syria.

To Clinton, such policy details were not as important as the black-and-white differences between her and Trump.

"He has said that he would order our military to carry out torture and the murder of civilians who are related to suspected terrorists, even though those are war crimes," Clinton said. "He says he doesn't have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has, quote, 'a very good brain.'"

"He also said, 'I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.' You know what?" she continued. "I don't believe him."

Clinton ended her remarks on a more solemn note, arguing that Trump's proposals, like barring Muslims from entering the United States, "could fuel an ugly narrative about who we are."

Trump, she said, would undo decades of statecraft by Republicans and Democrats. Striking a bipartisan note, Clinton recalled an advertisement Trump took out in newspapers in 1987, during the Reagan administration, "saying that America lacked a backbone and that the world was, you guessed it, laughing at us."

"You've got to wonder why somebody who fundamentally has so little confidence in America and has felt that way for at least 30 years wants to be our president," she said.