Hillary Clinton blasts Trump's "shameful" Obama "conspiracy theories"
PITTSBURGH -- Hillary Clinton challenged Republican leaders on Tuesday to reject Donald Trump's "conspiracy theories" about President Obama and the terrorist attack in Orlando, saying "history will remember" this moment.
"Will responsible Republican leaders stand up to their presumptive nominee?" she asked, speaking to supporters gathered in a union hall in Pittsburgh. "Or will they stand by his accusation about our president?"
Trump said in an interview on Monday that "we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind."
"There's something going on," Trump said, repeatedly.
Clinton called Trump's apparent implication "shameful" and "disrespectful," and dismissed Trump's "conspiracy theories" and "pathological self-congratulations."
"We need leadership and concrete plans because we are facing a brutal enemy," she said.
Clinton's blistering rebuke of Trump came in a speech written specifically to respond to Trump's remarks on national security in New Hampshire on Monday. It was a dramatic departure from Clinton's own speech about Orlando in Cleveland the day before, when she chose not to say Trump's name once.
Clinton said Tuesday she read "every word" of Trump's speech.
"He is fixated on the words 'radical Islam,'" she said. "I find this strange. Is Donald Trump suggesting that there are magic words that once uttered will stop terrorists from coming after us?"
Clinton, who used the phrase "radical Islamism" herself on Monday, said that "semantics" aren't important.
"In the end, it didn't matter what we called bin Laden," she said. "It mattered that we got bin Laden."
Clinton went on to blast Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country and un-American and ineffective, saying that it "would not have saved a single life in Orlando."
"The terrorist who carried out this attack wasn't born in Afghanistan, as Donald Trump said yesterday," she said. "He was born in Queens, New York -- just like Donald was himself."
Clinton also addressed "false things" that she said Trump said about her in his remarks, including that she would "abolish" the Second Amendment if elected president.
"That's wrong," she said. "These are demonstrably lies, but he feels compelled to tell them because he has to distract us from the fact he has nothing substantive to say."
Her speech here was another example of Clinton's new willingness to use her likely Republican opponent's own words against him, a tactic she used in San Diego and, most recently, in a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Washington. But in closing here, Clinton relied on the words of former President George W. Bush, as written in a letter and left for her husband in the Oval Office in January 1993.
"Your success now is our country's success --I am rooting hard for you," Bush wrote. Clinton said re-reading the letter brought her to tears.
"That's the America we love," Clinton said.