Trump's
national security nightmare: now even the neocons are freaking out
Lucia Graves
Monday 8 August 2016
22.54 BST
There’s rarely a
great deal of agreement in Washington, but the importance of keeping
Trump’s fingers off the nuclear button is fast becoming a consensus
As the first woman
to clinch a major party nomination, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is
already historic – and increasingly it looks like Donald Trump’s
is too. But not in a flattering way.
If last week came
the point at which he self-immolated the campaign and beloved Trump
brand, this week may be remembered as the time he finally drove his
party’s national security leadership to support the Democratic
candidate for president en masse, either by voting for her expressly
or by abstaining.
National security is
an issue that Republican presidential candidates have historically
been able to dominate but Trump may be the first guy in recent
history to blow that for the party. Even more remarkable is that top
neoconservatives in the party are all taking the Democrat’s side:
Clinton has said Trump “shouldn’t have his finger on the button”
of our nuclear arsenal. It looks like even Republican top brass
agrees.
On Thursday a long
list of GOP national security hands wrote a letter saying Trump would
be “the most reckless president in American history” and that
electing him in November would but the nation’s security at risk.
Some of the 50 signatories said they’d vote for Clinton while
others deemed it better to abstain from voting entirely. But all were
in fundamental agreement on one main point: “Trump is not qualified
and would be dangerous.”
This comes after
Evan McMullin, a former CIA official who recently worked for the
House Republican conference, filed papers to run for president as an
independent candidate. He doesn’t support Clinton, and having
missed the ballot-access deadlines in most states, the move is
expected to have little effect on the race other than to help the
former secretary of state by cutting into Trump’s margins. But
that’s just fine with McMullin, who says, “It’s never too late
to do the right thing.”
In fact if there’s
a common theme to this most recent wave of GOP dissenters, it’s
just how eerily close they sound to Hillary Clinton’s talking
points.
“He is unable or
unwilling to separate truth from falsehood,” the GOP national
security leaders said in the letter. “He does not encourage
conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He
cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies
with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an
individual who aspires to be president and commander in chief, with
command of the US nuclear arsenal.”
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Some in recent
interviews have specifically cited Trump’s recent comment inviting
Russia to hack into Clinton’s email servers, a remark Trump has
since claimed he was making in jest, as the moment that changed their
mind about him. They also touched on his embrace of Putin
specifically, calling his admiration for him and other foreign
dictators “unacceptable”.
That sounds a whole
lot like what Clinton’s been saying all along, if not what Barack
Obama said at the Democratic convention last month when he called
Trump’s rival the most qualified presidential candidate in history.
In our era of
political polarization and Congressional stagnation, it’s been ages
since top Republicans and Democrats in Washington could agree on
anything more definitively than the need to keep Trump out of the
White House. And without getting ahead of ourselves too much (for
Trump’s done nothing this election so well as outperform low
expectations), let’s hope the unlikely unity extends beyond the
neocons and with any luck, lasts longer than the election.
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