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After a horrific attack in Nice, France on Thursday that killed over 80 people, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered drastically different responses to the act of terror, once again highlighting their stark foreign policy differences. Clinton urged for greater intelligence gathering to disassemble terrorists groups internationally; Trump, however, announced his intention to seek a declaration of war against ISIS and impose strict immigration policies.
During a Bastille Day celebration in the southern French city on Thursday evening, a driver behind the wheel of a lorry truck plowed through a crowd of revelers walking through the city's promenade, leaving at least 84 people dead and hundreds of others injured—dozens critically. The driver was reportedly a 31-year-old man from Tunisia who had moved to the Nice area of France. Police managed to shoot and kill the driver, but not before he left a mile-and-a-half wake of death and destruction. This is the third major attack in France since January 2015, and President François Hollande announced he will extend the state of emergency—enacted after the November 2015 attacks that left 147 dead—for three months.
On Thursday evening, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, once again called for extreme vigilance in the wake of the most-recent terrorist attack, telling Bill O'Reilly he would seek a declaration of war from Congress to fight ISIS.
"This is war," Trump said. "If you look at it, this is war coming from all different parts."
As the Republican frontrunner has done in the past, Trump made clear that he would enforce stringent border restrictions if elected president. In an interview during Fox News' Thursday On the Record, he continued his unapologetic approach to foreign policy (like his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States), telling Greta van Sustern, "When I come out with my non-politically correct statements, that a lot of people love, and some people are so terrible, and then you have attacks like this and so many other attacks."
Trump then suggested that Syrian refugees are attempting to infiltrate the U.S, but declared that he would not allow such things to happen if elected president. "I would do extreme vetting," he said. "I would call it extreme vetting, too."
Like Trump, Clinton made clear that the U.S. is at war with terrorist groups, but asserted that engaging in boots-on-the-ground combat was not the correct approach to take.
"They would love to draw the United States into a ground war in Syria," Clinton told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "I would be very focused on the intelligence surge. I would be very focused on working with our partners and allies and intensify our efforts against the ideologues that pedal radical jihadism online."
Responding to Trump's continued criticism that she and President Obama refuse to phrase "radical Islam," Clinton told Cooper, "We're at war against radical jihadists who use Islam to recruit and radicalize others in order to pursue their evil agenda. It's not so important what we call these people as what we do about them, and I think back to our success in getting [Osama] bin Laden."
Clinton also chastised Trump's claims that she would subvert the screening process of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., as well as his assertion that she would allow terrorists posing as Syrian refugees to enter the country by being too lenient.
"I would not short-circuit the vetting process," she said. "If we are talking about women, children, orphans who are fleeing horrific violence, that's a different category than young men or people who have some record that could be ferreted out as some concern."
This most recent terrorist attacks come just days before the start of the Republican National Convention. In light of the attack, Trump postponed an even schedule for Friday morning in which he planned to announce his pick for vice president (he tweeted the announcement instead). With the looming threat of global terrorism already a tremendous issue in this year's electoral process, it's likely to dominate discussion during both next week's RNC and the Democratic National Convention in the week following.
Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/clinton-and-trump-on-attack-in-nice-this-is-war
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