Forget the Nuclear Triad, Show Him the Button!

Will Trump flunk the commander-in-chief test?

The real-estate mogul thinks he’s got what it takes. The GOP establishment thinks otherwise.

By JEREMY HERB 01/22/16 05:17 AM EST Updated 01/22/16 01:00 PM EST

The Republican defense establishment is terrified Donald Trump will fail the “commander in chief test” with voters should he continue to defy all predictions and become the GOP nominee.

Just a few months ago, at an annual gathering of national security leaders at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, former Republican lawmakers and national security officials openly dismissed the real estate mogul-turned-entertainer, predicting his campaign for the White House would soon falter.

But with Trump’s steady rise in the polls, even as national security has loomed ever larger in the campaign, they are now officially spooked by his apparent lack of preparedness to be commander-in-chief — and what it could mean in a head-to-head contest against the Democratic favorite, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican lawmakers and national security experts.

Trump has made a long list of curious statements on foreign policy. In a recent debate, he didn’t seem to know about the “nuclear triad” — the nuclear-armed bombers, land-based missiles and submarines that make up the U.S. atomic arsenal. He has confused the F-35 fighter jet with the Long-Range Strike Bomber, and the Kurds with Iran’s Quds Force. He’s said he gets military advice watching television, has praised U.S. foes like Russian President Vladimir Putin and has shown no apparent interest in seeking the counsel of the party’s national security sages.

“He wouldn’t just get an F — he’d get a zero,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, who is backing Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and is a former top aide to Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee who now chairs the Armed Services Committee.

A who’s who of GOP defense bigwigs have disparaged Trump’s national security missives. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said in October that he was “troubled by a whole series of his statements.” Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote an op-ed, “The kind of president we need,” which said: “Primal screaming may be good therapy, but it is a poor substitute for practical politics.”

George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, speaks during a forum ‘Charting A New Growth Path for the Euro Zone’ at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2011. | AP Photo

And McCain, whom Trump mocked last year for having been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has repeatedly slammed Trump’s claim that he’ll convince Mexico to pay for a wall along the U.S. southern border. “If he’s the nominee, he’ll have a pretty steep learning curve. I think that’s pretty obvious,” McCain told POLITICO.

Trump has argued that he is the best candidate in the Republican field for the military, and that his business background would help root out waste at the Pentagon. During a national security speech he delivered in September on the retired battleship USS Iowa, he vowed that he would build up the military “so big and so strong and so great, and it will be so powerful that I don’t think we’re ever going to have to use it.”

But in the view of the GOP defense establishment, Trump has emerged as a key threat to the party’s strategy to make national security and foreign policy a cornerstone of the race for the White House, as well as the case against Clinton.

Indeed, at the Reagan Forum, the assembled experts dismissed both Trump and rival candidate Ben Carson as little more than a bad joke in panel after panel, offering the mantra that both anti-establishment campaigns would falter once voters started paying attention to national security.

Then came November’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., which placed terrorism high on the list of voter concerns. But while Carson stumbled, as predicted, Trump has only grown stronger with Republican primary voters.

“Obviously, nobody really took Trump seriously for quite time. Now, of course, he can’t be ignored,” said Dov Zakheim, who was a senior foreign policy adviser to former President George W. Bush and served as the Pentagon’s budget chief in the Bush administration. He is not backing any candidate in the 2016 race.

Also galling to longtime GOP defense leaders: Unlike the other candidates, Trump does not appear to have reached out to any of the traditional advisers on foreign policy and national security. Analysts at the major conservative think tanks and others who have briefed 2016 candidates say they’ve heard nothing from Trump’s campaign — and know no one advising him.

“Absolutely none that I am aware of,” said Eric Edelman, an adviser to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney who co-founded the John Hay Initiative, which has briefed multiple candidates and offered a foreign policy playbook to all of the 2016 field.