Donald Trump came out swinging in response to Hillary Clinton's foreign policy speech Thursday in which she called the presumptive Republican nominee "temperamentally unfit to lead."
The businessman-turned-politician has said several times over the last few months that when he is attacked, he hits back. And his reaction to Clinton's criticisms was true to form.
He called her speech "pathetic" and said it "had nothing to do with foreign policy." Then he ramped up his attack on the Democratic front-runner, saying she should be convicted for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State.
"Remember I said I was a counter-puncher?" an animated Trump asked an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at a rally in San Jose, Calif. "After what she said about me today in her phony speech — that was a phony speech, that was a Donald Trump hit job — I will say this, Hillary Clinton has to go to jail. She's guilty as hell."
Trump said Clinton has endorsed the Obama administration's foreign policy moves — such as the nuclear deal with Iran and the prisoner exchange that freed U.S. POW Bowe Bergdahl from the Taliban — in order to avoid prosecution.
"Anything Obama wants she's going forward with," he said. "Because you know why? Because she doesn't want to go to jail."
"The fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States," Trump added.
He said he has confidence in the FBI investigation of the matter and that he couldn't imagine that "our country can let her get away with this crime." Even if she was not prosecuted, the scandal is certain to be a major issue in the campaign, he said. Trump also left open the possibility that his own attorney general would investigate her emails if he became president.
Trump dismissed Clinton's claim that he was not up to the responsibility of managing America's nuclear arsenal, arguing that his judgment was better than hers.
"I'm the one who didn't want to go into Iraq folks," he said. "And she's the one that stupidly raised her hand to go into Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East."
And as for his temperament being unsuitable for the Oval Office?
"My temperament is so much tougher and so much better than her temperament," he said.
Trump's claim that he didn't want to go into Iraq isn't exactly true. Although he did express some reservations about the cost and direction of the war in the beginning, according to Factcheck.org.
"There is no evidence that we could find, however, that he spoke against the war before it started, although we did find he expressed early concerns about the cost and direction of the war a few months after it started," factcheck.org writes. "Others have looked, but no one else — including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — has been able to find any evidence to support his claims, either."
And in a radio interview with Howard Stern on Sept. 11, 2002 before the war started, uncovered by BuzzFeed News, Trump said he did support an invasion.
Stern asked Trump if he supported going to war and Trump said: "Yeah, I guess so.”
