Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., late Wednesday refused to let Donald Trump off the hook for his failure to answer detailed questions about foreign policy, and implied that Trump’s answers over the past few weeks show he’s not ready to lead the country.
Rubio’s opening came after CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked Trump about his inability to answer questions involving the names of the United States’ Middle Eastern enemies during a radio interview. Trump immediately responded by pointing out that it was a misunderstanding because he misheard the radio host’s question.
The host was Hugh Hewitt, also a moderator at Wednesday’s presidential debate on CNN.
“I will say this though, Hugh was giving me name after name, Arab name after Arab name, and there are few people anywhere, anywhere, that would have known those names,” Trump said. “I think he was reading them off a sheet. And I will tell you I will have, and I told him, I will have the finest team that anybody’s put together and we will solve a lot of problems.”
The word Trump struggled to hear on the radio was “Quds,” which he mistook for “Kurds.” Quds refers to the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and Kurds are an ethnic group of people, many of whom reside in northern Iraq.
Rubio, who is number six in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, responded to Trump by saying the nation cannot afford to wait for a president to learn on the job.
“The next president of the United States better be someone that understands these issues and has good judgment about them,” Rubio said. “Because the number one issue that a president will ever confront, and the most important obligation that the federal government has, is to keep this nation safe and today we are not doing that. We are eviscerating our military and we have a president that is more respectful to the Ayatollah in Iran than he is to the prime minister of Israel.”
“You better be able to lead our country on the first day, not six months from now, not a year from now, on the first day in office our president could very well confront a national security crisis,” he said.
“I will know more about the problems of this world by the time I sit [in office],” Trump replied.
Hewitt later followed up with Trump to ask, “When are we going to get some names of your military and foreign policy advisers?”
“I’m meeting with people that are terrific people,” Trump answered without providing names of his advisers or when he would do so. “I’m a very militaristic person, but you have to know when to use it. I’m the only person up here that fought against going into Iraq.”
Trump previously indicated on NBC that he received his foreign policy guidance from military experts who appear on television.
