But maybe the most surprising difference between Clinton and Trump on September 11 and in the nerve-racking days and weeks that followed: She, not he, sounded like the tougher talker.
In the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the country, Trump talked publicly mostly about the buildings, and his buildings, and market ramifications and the character and resiliency of the citizens of the city where he’s lived almost his entire life. But reporters then had only so much reason to ask him about issues of national security or foreign policy.
In Clinton’s voice, though, in remarks in news conferences and TV interviews and on the Senate floor, there was an audible mixture of patriotism and hopes for bipartisanship—and vengeance, too. A full week before President Bush painted a stark divide of a new world—“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he said in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20—Clinton expressed the identical idea, and in equally bellicose terms, on CBS Evening News. “Every nation has to be either with us, or against us,” she told Dan Rather. “Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”
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