U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump kicked off a fierce general election battle, with Democrats accusing Trump of erratic behavior and the Republican threatening to bring up old Clinton scandals.
Clinton, the former secretary of state, made history when she became the first woman to lead a major political party in its quest to capture the U.S. presidency. Big primary election wins on Tuesday in California and elsewhere catapulted her to victory over Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders.
If elected on Nov. 8, the 68-year-old former U.S. senator from New York would return the Clinton family to the White House 16 years after her husband, Bill Clinton, completed two terms as president.
All signs point toward a negative campaign as Clinton accused Trump of being temperamentally unfit to serve and the New York businessman charged that Clinton had a dark past and a weak record as President Barack Obama’s first-term secretary of state.
Clinton told NBC on Wednesday she would not run a “campaign of insults,” but she sought to portray the 69-year-old Trump as not fit for the Oval Office after the real estate developer repeatedly accused a Mexican-American judge of showing bias against him because of his ethnic heritage.
The Clinton campaign has pointed to criticism from leaders in Trump’s Republican Party to make this case.
“I’m going to talk about why he’s unqualified to be president based on his own words and his deeds. And I’m going to continue to make the case he is temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief,” she said in the interview.
Trump gave a carefully crafted primary race victory speech on Tuesday laying out his own plan of attack. To keep from straying off message, he used a Teleprompter and avoided his typical stream-of-consciousness delivery.
Trump said money given to the Clinton Foundation charity from foreign donors had earned the Clintons millions of dollars and had a corrupting influence when Clinton was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund – the Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese – all gave money to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return. It’s a sad day in America when foreign governments with deep pockets have more influence in our own country than our great citizens,” Trump said.
He said he would give a speech next week “discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.”
CLINTON LEADS
A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed Clinton leading Trump by 10 percentage points nationally, little changed from a week earlier. [nL1N18Y1Z2]
Both Clinton and Trump must unite their parties but the Democrat appeared to face the easier path with Sanders, a leftist U.S. senator from Vermont, nearly out of options to challenge her.
Trump has an uphill battle. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan described Trump’s remarks about the judge as a “textbook definition of a racist comment,” but said he would still support him.
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