Former CIA director Michael Hayden thinks Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is essentially a “recruiting sergeant” for Islamic State.
Hayden said Tuesday in an interview with Al Jazeera’s “UpFront” that “the fundamental narrative of ISIS…is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the Western world.”
“When Mr. Trump says some of the things that he has said, “They all hate us, we shouldn’t let any of those people in our country,” what he does is underscore and underpin the fundamentals of their narrative of undying enmity. You don’t have to be president…for that kind of statement from someone so prominent in the American political system to have already made Americans less safe,” Hayden added.
“So he could be described as a recruiting sergeant for these groups?” host Mehdi Hasan asked.
‘Yes,” Hayden said.
Hayden has elsewhere taken every opportunity to slam Trump for what Hayden believes is his overly aggressive and outlandish foreign policy stances.
“It’s not so much wrong or overly certain. It’s incoherent,” Hayden said earlier this month on “Fox & Friends.”
At a recent event put on by the American Enterprise Institute, Hayden said if Trump wanted to restart the practice of waterboarding terrorists, he’d have to bring his own bucket, since the CIA will refuse to cooperate.
Previously, Hayden also said the military would refuse to obey Trump’s orders if those orders violate internal military policy and international agreements on the use of torture. In a rare display, Trump subsequently qualified his statements and said he would not directly order troops to violate international treaties, though he has since reiterated the need for waterboarding and other harsh methods of interrogation.
Although Hayden maintained in the Al Jazeera interview that Trump has made Americans less safe, a new poll conducted by Morning Consult found 59 percent of Republican respondents who ranked national security as the issue of foremost importance chose Trump as their preferred candidate.
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