Three-time Purple Heart recipient, former United States Army officer, and former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Barry McCaffrey, wrote an op-ed in The Seattle Times slamming Donald Trump as “a willful and abusive braggart” unfit to serve as president.
“Trump lacks the caution and careful judgment that is required by a future president of the United States when forming national-security and foreign-policy decisions.
Trump sounds like a 12-year-old — a willful and abusive braggart. He is remarkably ignorant and uneducated about the world that we face and the means we may use to defend ourselves.”
Barry McCaffrey, who finished his 32 years in the military as a four-star general, is not the first national security expert to publicly denounce Donald Trump as unqualified to serve as commander-in-chief. Former CIA Chief Michael Morell, retired Marine Corps General John Allen, former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, current CIA Director John Brennan, and most recently 50 GOP national security officials have spoken out against Trump and his foreign policy. Many cited Trump’s slander of the Gold Star Muslim-American Khan family as the final straw, including McCaffrey:
“The shameful reaction by presidential candidate Donald Trump to the mother and father of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan prompts me to state publicly that Trump should never serve as our commander in chief. The decorated Capt. Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq at age 27 while bravely defending his soldiers during a suicide attack, is the best America offers. His grieving parents were understandably outraged at the degrading notion that America should have a religious screen, legally denying immigration status to Muslims.
Trump, if elected, would provoke a political and constitutional crisis within a year.”
McCaffrey then lists the numerous problematic statements Donald Trump has made on the subjects of national security and foreign policy:
“He has called for the illegal torture of enemy detainees. He has called for the deliberate targeting and murder of civilians as retribution. He has questioned whether the U.S. should actually fulfill our defense obligations under the NATO pact. These NATO obligations are a U.S. Senate-ratified treaty that Trump should know is the highest law of the land.
Further, Trump has implied that the U.S. should encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons — allies like Japan and South Korea were urged to become nuclear powers. He has praised Saddam Hussein as an effective anti-terrorist fighter. Hussein was a mass murderer who targeted his own people with an inhumane vengeance to include employing chemical weapons.
Trump has publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has become a major threat to Western Europe with his invasion of Ukraine and muscular threats to the Baltic States and NATO regional military forces. Putin has also managed to reverse Russia’s earlier steady march toward a law-based state and is turning that magnificent country into a criminal oligarchy.”
Barry McCaffrey also criticizes Trump for his prideful ignorance:
“Trump has boasted that his Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps time at a small military high school made him more knowledgeable about national security than most career military professionals. He has stated he knows more about the Islamic State than the generals of the U.S. Armed Forces. Trump has also suggested we can walk away from our U.S. Treasury debt to the international community in a form of selective bankruptcy. This would be a curious form of collective economic suicide.”
Denouncements like this are simply unprecedented in American politics. Never before has the intelligence and national security community come out in such numbers and with such force against a presidential candidate. But Donald Trump is not a normal candidate. Not even Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide largely due to concerns about his willingness to use nuclear weapons, posed such a grave threat to national security and world peace.
