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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to Discuss Security and Veterans Issues Forum Offers Preview of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Presidential Debate
(about 13 hours later)
They have quarreled from across the country and lobbed attacks over the airwaves, but on Wednesday night Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton will finally take each other on from the same stage. Hillary Clinton vowed not to send American ground troops to Iraq “ever again” and Donald J. Trump suggested that he had learned shocking new national security information as the two made back-to-back appearances Wednesday night at a forum that became a preview of their highly anticipated debate later this month.
While they will not appear together — voters will have to wait until a late September debate for that — the two presidential hopefuls will take turns fielding questions on national security and veterans issues, offering the clearest opportunity yet to compare and contrast the positions of the Republican and Democratic candidates. After weeks of scripted speeches and attack lines, the “commander in chief forum” will force Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton to think candidly on their feet. Mrs. Clinton, who was repeatedly put on the defensive by veterans in the audience over her judgment and trustworthiness, sought to reassure voters that she would be a forceful and steady commander in chief, noting her role in the killing of Osama bin Laden and pledging that defeating the Islamic State was her “highest counterterrorism goal.”
The event, to be held in New York and broadcast at 8 p.m. Eastern on NBC and MSNBC, will be moderated by the “Today” anchor Matt Lauer and presented in conjunction with the group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America. She promised air power and other support to Arab and Muslim allies but added, “We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again, and we’re not putting them into Syria.”
The forum comes as polls show a tightening race between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, and national security an issue of serious concern among voters. Mr. Trump is widely viewed as the better candidate to tackle the threat of terrorism, but voter surveys show lingering skepticism about his temperament. Mr. Trump was withering in his attacks on her record while defensive about his own shifting stands on the Iraq war over the years, and insisted that he believed that he was ready to become commander in chief on the first day in office.
While Mrs. Clinton’s deep foreign policy experience is hard to dispute, the Trump campaign has cast her as someone who cannot be trusted to protect state secrets. Mr. Trump has hammered her for carelessly handling classified information as secretary of state, pointing to her use of a private email account. “A hundred percent,” Mr. Trump said, one of several instances when he made blunt statements without providing details. He asserted that he was “studying” and “meeting constantly” with experts to prepare for the presidency, but declined to offer specifics.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has vowed to bolster the military and protect America’s veterans, but he also angered some of them last month by confronting the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq and by denigrating the military service of Senator John McCain, who Mr. Trump said last year was “not a war hero.” Of the two candidates, Mrs. Clinton faced by far the toughest and most probing questions from the moderator, Matt Lauer of NBC, and from the audience about her use of private email, her vote authorizing the Iraq war, her hawkish foreign policy views, and other issues.
After the second episode, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America group called on Mr. Trump to apologize to veterans across the country. She appeared stilted at first, particularly when one Republican in the audience — a veteran who had held a top-secret naval flight clearance — said he would have been “prosecuted and imprisoned” if he had handled classified information as she did on her private email server. He charged that she had “clearly corrupted our national security.”
Mr. Trump has been working to improve his standing with members of the military. This week he said that he had received endorsements from nearly 90 military figures and said that his candidacy provided an important opportunity for a national security “course correction.” “I appreciate your concern and also your experience,” Mrs. Clinton began, and then launched into a lengthy explanation, describing the designations for classified material and how she had handled the most sensitive material “very seriously.”
Veterans are a crucial voting block around the country, particularly in swing states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. While veterans and active-duty personnel historically lean Republican, data collected by the association on its members suggests that the fastest-growing segment of post-9/11 veterans may be those registered as independents. “ I did exactly what I should have done,” she said, adding, “Always have, and always will.”
Although both candidates generally played it safe in August, sticking to speeches and fund-raisers, they appear to be showing a growing willingness to face voters directly in the final two months of the campaign. Questions about pay for military members, housing allowances and fixing the Department of Veterans Affairs are expected to be top of mind. The forum, which took place at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan, served as a dry run for the first Clinton-Trump debate set for Sept. 26, with both candidates making an effort to draw distinct differences over policy and test out memorable lines on national security and the health and economic concerns of veterans and other Americans.
A coin toss determined that Mrs. Clinton would take questions first, followed by Mr. Trump. It was also a rare moment when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump all but appeared in the same room together, talking one after the other and facing the same audience and moderator. By the end of the night the candidates offered a study in contrasts on both substance and style.
Mrs. Clinton was far more specific than Mr. Trump in laying out her ideas to provide mental health care and create jobs for veterans, and she highlighted her extensive foreign policy experience as secretary of state and as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
On body language, the two diverged, too. Mrs. Clinton was far more likely to look audience members in the eye, nod along as they expressed concern or curiosity, and give relatively direct if sometimes uncomfortable answers. Mr. Trump came off as more relaxed but also far lighter on details, and was seldom pressed by Mr. Lauer or the veterans.
One of the most surprising moments of the night came when Mr. Trump chose to answer a question about the confidential national security briefings that he has recently begun to receive — a topic that presidents and presidential candidates rarely discuss with any openness.
Mr. Trump, asked if he learned anything alarming, said, “There was one thing that shocked me” and suggested that it involved a decision by President Obama and Mrs. Clinton that amounted to “a total disaster.”
He then went further, asserting that Mr. Obama “did not follow what our experts said to do,” and even claimed that the government officials who provided the briefing were “not happy” with Mr. Obama. Explaining the basis of that assessment, Mr. Trump said, “I was pretty good with the body language.”
It was a classic Trump moment — a dark insinuation without evidence — and his campaign did not immediately provide details.
Mr. Trump ridiculed Mr. Obama as much as he did Mrs. Clinton during his 25-minute appearance, deriding the president over the recent diplomatic incident in China where local officials would not provide the requisite staircase for Air Force One. “They wouldn’t give him stairs,” Mr. Trump said.
Both candidates also lamented the surge in suicides among veterans, with Mrs. Clinton offering the most details and expressions of empathy over the problems of poor mental health care and the widespread use of painkillers for veterans. About 20 veterans die each day by suicide, according to a major study by the veterans’ agency published this summer, and the suicide rate among veterans has increased 35 percent since 2001.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with family members, survivors, who have lost a loved one when he or she came home,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We’ve got to remove the stigma” of depression and other mental health problems.
Mr. Trump put the blame for suicide squarely on the Department of Veterans Affairs, blasting it as “almost a corrupt enterprise” and saying that veterans were killing themselves because “they are under tremendous pain and they can’t see a doctor.”
Several polls have shown Mr. Trump with a solid lead over Mrs. Clinton among veterans, yet she has drawn an unusually strong number of endorsements from generals and admirals as well as national security experts who are Republicans or who served under Republican presidents.
Mr. Trump, who went to pains to point out several generals in the forum’s audience who were supporting him, has increasingly sought to position himself as the candidate of the military — in part, aides say, to increase his chances of winning swing states like Florida and Virginia, where there are sizable numbers of veterans and military families.
Earlier on Wednesday he called for a massive expansion of the military, such as adding about 60,000 troops to the Army for a total of 540,000 and increasing the number of Marine Corps battalions from 23 to 36. To do so, Mr. Trump said he would ask Congress to eliminate so-called sequestration caps on military spending that have forced the reduction of troops — budget limits that Mr. Trump had supported until recently.
But in a sign of the relatively gentle questioning of Mr. Trump at the forum, no one challenged him over the low likelihood that his proposals would come to pass. Democrats in Congress have stood firm against lifting the caps unless domestic spending is allowed to grow too, and some military analysts have questioned the need for some spending goals.
One of the few confrontations between the two candidates — albeit indirect, with Mr. Lauer pressing one after the other — came over the future of government-run veterans’ hospitals and other services. Mrs. Clinton promised to improve services and then, in a potent warning to veterans and their family members, suggested that Mr. Trump would harm veterans’ services by putting them in the hands of private health providers.
“I will not let the V.A. be privatized and I do think there’s an agenda out there supported by my opponent to do just that,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Mr. Trump adamantly denied the charge. “I never said take the Veterans Administration private,” he said. “I have too much respect” for veterans, he added.
Yet Mr. Trump’s proposals, in effect, would most likely prompt many veterans to choose private care and lead to a vastly smaller government health system for veterans. He said on Wednesday that veterans should be able to choose any private doctor or hospital rather than wait for treatment from veterans’ hospitals, and promised that the federal government would “pay the bill” for that private care.
Such an option would cost many billions of dollars, yet Mr. Trump has not said how he would cover the costs beyond ending “waste, fraud and abuse at the V.A.”