Isis backs Republican
Hillary Clinton said yesterday that Isis leaders were praying for Donald Trump to win the United States election.
Isis ( Islamic State) would view a victory for Trump as a “gift” from Allah, and believed it would provide “more motivation to every jihadi”, she said.
Clinton, the Democratic nominee, made the comments during a press conference, in response to a question about a Time magazine article which included quotes from Isis supporters openly rooting for Trump.
“They have said that they hope that he is the president because it would give even more motivation to every jihadi,” she said.
The comments came a day after Clinton and Trump took part in a televised foreign policy forum in which Trump said Russia’s Vladimir Putin had been a better leader than Barack Obama.
Clinton described his remarks as “astonishing” during a rally yesterday in North Carolina.
“It’s not just unpatriotic, it’s not just insulting to the office and the man who holds the office,” she said.
“It is scary. It is dangerous. It actually suggests that he will let Putin do whatever Putin wants and then make excuses for him.” detailing her various policy plans.
Trump has refused to release his tax returns, while she’s disclosed decades of filings.
And while she’s apologised for a long list of past policy ideas and personal choices, including her use of a private email account while serving as Secretary of State, he’s acknowledged just once that there are statements “I do regret”. He’s never specified what, exactly, he was sorry about.
Clinton’s campaign acknowledges that some of her liabilities stem from self- imposed errors, including her difficulty explaining the decision to install a private email server in her New York home.
Republican opponents have no shortage of examples which they say demonstrate that it’s Clinton who expects deferential treatment. Even some Clinton supporters will admit that she has mishandled — and often completely avoided — questions about her email and her family’s charitable foundation, fuelling scru- tiny of both. But they also believe her missteps have been given far more weight than those of Trump.
“He’s displayed a reckless level of ignorance and intolerance and that needs to be called out,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. “He should be held to the same standard of truthfulness of his statements.”
As part of their effort, Clinton and her team have begun tip- toeing into a topic they’ve often tried to avoid: sexism.
After Thursday’s forum ended, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tweeted a critique of Clinton’s performance as “angry + defensive the entire time — no smile and uncomfortable”.
“People. Reince actually said HRC needed to smile more. This is real,” tweeted Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri.
Stuart Stevens, a vocal Trump critic and senior strategist to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, tweeted: “In front of a weather map, smiling a lot might be a job requirement. In the Oval Office, it’s not.”
In a Facebook post published on the page Humans of New York yesterday, Clinton recounted taking a law school admissions test at Harvard University in 1969 and being harassed by male students.
“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘ walled off ’,” she wrote in the post. “If I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional.”
Some of the pushback is clearly strategic. A fundraising email sent out by the Clinton campaign yesterday used Lauer’s failure to “fact- check Trump” to rally supporters.
With the first debate scheduled for later this month, Clinton’s campaign i s trying to ensure that Trump i s positioned for a tough evaluation, recognising that expectations can matter even more than actual performance. Aides fear a scenario in which a single misstep by Clinton gets a tougher assessment than repeated mistakes by Trump.
In the Republican primaries, Trump’s opponents were repeatedly frustrated by his ability to dominate the news cycle with provocative comments and his failure to suffer any consequences for his words. Republican strategists say Clinton should have been more prepared for that to happen in the general election.
“Trump has an ability to manipulate situations like that to his advantage, which we saw over and over in the primary,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, the former campaign manager for Republican candidate Carly Fiorina. “She can complain about the rules of the game, but she also knows the rules of the campaign.”