Trump gets racked over... And not talking about the hair...

Democrats key on Trump's national security fitness

After spate of startling statements by GOP nominee, Democrats see a clear line of attack.

By Michael Crowley

With Democrats sensing that Donald Trump is newly vulnerable on national security grounds after startling statements about Russia and NATO, Wednesday night's convention speakers blasted Trump’s fitness to be commander in chief, suggesting that only Hillary Clinton could keep America safe — and avoid nuclear war.

“No major party nominee in the history of our nation has ever known less or been less prepared to deal with our national security,” said Vice President Joe Biden.

Even more forceful was former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta. “We cannot afford an erratic finger on our nuclear weapons,” Panetta said. “This is no time to gamble with America’s national security.”

Panetta followed a video presentation which a featured a montage of retired military officials and conservative foreign policy analysts — from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, to Fox News pundit Charles Krauthammer — labeling Trump as “unmoored” and “unfit” to lead the military.

The video also featured footage of a prowling submarine and President Ronald Reagan solemnly declaring that “a nuclear war can never be won,” invoking Cold War memories of potential global Armageddon.

President Barack Obama said that Clinton would “finish the job” of fighting the Islamic State, “and she’ll do it without resorting to torture, or banning entire religions from entering our country. She is fit to be the next commander in chief.”

Not since the end of the Cold War has a major party so directly warned that a rival nominee might start a nuclear war. In 2008, Republicans charged that Obama himself was unfit to be commander in chief, but did not suggest he might start thermonuclear war. But Democratic operatives say the notion of a nuclear-armed Trump is likely to have a special resonance with swing voters who may find Trump’s volatile personality a positive in other ways.

Meanwhile, at least one speaker warned that Trump would lead America into conventional wars like those of the past decade.

“His recklessness means more deployments for my friends, more families separated, and more young heroes never coming home,” said Kristen Kavanaugh, a former Marine Corps captain who spoke in the 8 p.m. hour. (That charge conveniently overlooked Clinton's support for several recent U.S. military interventions, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2011 U.S. bombing of Libya.)

The latest Democratic assaults on Trump come after a series of statements by the Republican nominee — including his Wednesday appeal to Russia’s government to “find” and reveal Clinton’s deleted emails — that have flabbergasted seasoned national security professionals in both parties.

Although many national security elites sharply criticized Trump during the GOP primaries, their concerns have escalated to high alarm in recent weeks as Trump has remained close to Clinton in the polls. They now describe a potentially sinister bent to Trump's worldview, one not apparent until recent weeks.

Last fall and winter, Trump’s GOP opponents mostly focused on Trump’s inexperience and ignorance about foreign policy issues. “Donald Trump has zero foreign policy experience,” Marco Rubio told a South Carolina audience in February. “Negotiating a hotel deal in another country is not foreign policy experience.”

But in the roughly three months since Trump locked up the GOP nomination, even some conservative foreign policy experts have come to believe that Trump is not just ill-informed — but driven by dangerous ideas that fly in the face of broad foreign policy consensus.

They have reacted to Trump’s open skepticism of the 67-year-old NATO alliance, whose relevance and cost to the U.S. he has questioned. Trump also suggested to The New York Times last week that he might not honor America’s obligation under the NATO treaty to come to the defense of member states that are attacked and warned that his message to allies who do not contribute enough financially to their own defense is: “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”

President Obama ridiculed that position in his Wednesday speech, saying that Trump “tells the NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection. Well, America’s promises do not come with a price tag. We meet our commitments.”

Earlier, Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, also took a shot at Trump’s NATO language, noting that his 26-year-old son Nathaniel had recently deployed to Eastern Europe "to protect and defend the very NATO allies that Donald Trump says he now wants to abandon."

Analysts say Trump’s NATO comments also fit a larger pattern, which has only become clear in recent weeks, of a Russia-friendly worldview that would cast aside a shared hostility toward Vladimir Putin among Republicans and Democrats alike. Both parties have strongly condemned Putin’s foreign policy for years, particularly after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and then supported a pro-Russian separatist insurgency in the country’s east. In response, the U.S. and Europe have imposed stiff economic sanctions on Moscow, and many senior members of Obama’s national security team have urged him to arm Ukraine’s military — as have numerous leading Republicans in Congress.

But last week, Trump officials stymied an effort to add language to the Republican Party platform that would call for arming Ukraine. And in remarks that drew less attention than his call on Russia to find and reveal Clinton’s missing emails, Trump said Wednesday that he would consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and lifting the punitive U.S. sanctions on Moscow. “Yes. We would be looking into that,” Trump said when asked about the possibility.

Trump’s conciliatory words about Ukraine have particularly unsettled many observers given the influence of his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who worked for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally who fled Kiev after pro-western demonstrations in February and took refuge in Russia.

Some Democrats on Wednesday also focused on Trump’s call for Russia to locate some 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from her private email server. “[H]e asked the Russians to interfere in American politics,” Panetta marveled. “Donald Trump is asking one of our adversaries to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts against the United States of America to affect an election.”

“We cannot elect a man who belittles or closest allies while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin,” Biden said.