CINCINNATI — Democrat Hillary Clinton scoffed at the capabilities and worldview of Republican opponent Donald Trump on Wednesday, including his hasty trip to Mexico, as she courted support from veterans and conservatives concerned about national security.
"You deserve a leader who honors your service not just with words, but with deeds," Clinton told an audience of several thousand veterans at the American Legion annual conference.
Trump, she said, understands little about how American alliances operate or the principles of U.S. engagement abroad. She appealed to the patriotism and military experience of a conservative-leaning audience, many of whom she jokingly observed, had probably never voted for a Democrat.
"My opponent is wrong when he says that America is no longer great," she said. "Make no mistake, I do believe we have better days ahead. But things could also get worse," she said, if a variety of scenarios raised by Trump's campaign statements came true.
"If more countries get nuclear weapons, if we abandon our allies, if our commander in chief orders our military to ignore laws" against torture or assassination, Clinton said.
Her latest effort to paint Trump as too dangerous and ill-informed to command American diplomacy or its armed forces came as Trump made a brief trip to Mexico, the border ally he has accused of exporting criminals and rapists to the United States. He met with President Enrique Peña Nieto at the Mexican leader's invitation.
Clinton received a similar invitation but has not accepted.
"Getting countries working together was my job every day as your secretary of state," Clinton said. "It's more than a photo op. It takes consistency and reliability.
"And it certainly takes more than trying to make up for a year of insults and insinuations by dropping in on our neighbors for a few hours and then flying home again. That is not how it works."
Much of the speech focused on the idea of "American exceptionalism," which broadly refers to the view that the United States was created differently than other nations and bears singular global responsibilities. It is a decades-old notion often more popular on the political right than the left. Although not an inherently partisan idea, it was associated with so-called neoconservative thinkers who backed the Iraq War and other U.S. interventions taken in the name of democratic nation-building.
Clinton is embracing it before a generally conservative audience as a means of highlighting what she calls Trump's dangerous turn away from traditional alliances and his divergence from Republican national security orthodoxy.
"Part of what makes America an exceptional nation is that we are also an indispensible nation," Clinton said. "In fact, we are the indispensible nation. People all over the world look to us, and follow our lead."
The crowd of mostly elderly men gave Clinton a polite if somewhat tepid reception, and there were numerous empty seats. She drew applause when she said that if elected president she would never insult the families of war dead or prisoners of war, a reference to Trump's remarks about the family of Humayun Khan and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Email saga continues: An email that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sent almost four months after she left the State Department was partly redacted before being publicly released, raising questions about whether she conveyed classified information as a private citizen.
The May 2013 email, which the Republican National Committee obtained under a Freedom of Information Act and provided Wednesday, joins more than 2,000 messages that the former secretary of state sent or received through her private server during her tenure that have been labeled "confidential," a low level of classification.
Clinton and her campaign have said that many of the documents were classified retroactively in order to release them publicly. That was the case with the May 2013 email, State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement Wednesday.
Information from the New York Times was used in this report.