Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton exchange fire in California battle

Not even the air conditioning unit in Donald Trump's podium could cool the red-hot attack the presumptive Republican presidential nominee launched on his likely Democratic adversary, Hillary Clinton, in sweltering Sacramento.

On Wednesday evening, the billionaire reality-TV star addressed 3,000 supporters who sizzled in the heat of a hangar at Sacramento International Airport while standing in front of his “Trump Force One” jet.

It was Trump's first rally in California this week ahead of the final state contests in a Republican primary that he wrapped up last month. The Golden State likes its celebrity candidates, having elected actors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger as governors.

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US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Sacramento, California. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Trump delivered an aggressive performance on stage, launching a pre-emptive strike against Clinton before she delivered an aggressive policy speech in California today casting her opponent as a threat to national security.

In one of the strongest speeches of her 14-month campaign, Clinton unloaded on Trump, telling an audience in San Diego that his foreign policy ideas were “dangerously incoherent.”

“They are not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies,” she said.

Trump was “not just unprepared” to be president, she said, but was “temperamentally unfit” to hold the office. The billionaire “should never have the nuclear codes”, she said, and suggested that he might lead the US into war because “someone got under his very thin skin.”

Trump's support for nuclear proliferation – he said in March that Japan should have nuclear weapons – has alarmed Washington's foreign policy fraternity, though he appeared to flip-flop on the issue in Sacramento, saying Clinton had misrepresented his comments.

“It was such lies about my foreign policy, that they said I want Japan to get nuclear weapons. Give me a break,” he said.

Lashing Clinton for having “no natural talent”, he called her “one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of our country”.

The businessman continued: “She doesn’t know what the hell she is doing. It’s going to be another four years of disaster.”

Another poll showed Clinton facing a much tighter than expected Democratic primary fight in California against Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Today’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll gave her a 49-47 per cent lead against Sanders. Still, she needs just a third of the remaining delegates awarded in California and the other five final contests voting on Tuesday to secure the Democratic nomination.

Most polls show Clinton beating Trump – but not by as much as Sanders, in hypothetical general election match-ups of how they might fare in November.

At his Sacramento rally, Trump ignored the controversy over legal actions taken by former students who have accused Trump University, the wealth- building college he started in 2005, of fraudulent and misleading behaviour.

Former managers at the university revealed in testimony disclosed on Tuesday that the college pressurised students to sign up to classes costing tens of thousands of dollars taught by unqualified instructors.

"He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U," said Clinton at a rally in New Jersey on Wednesday.

Trump has shrugged off the latest court fight, engaging in a racially loaded attack on the US judge presiding over the case. He called Gonzalo Curiel, the Indiana-born US district judge, “a hater” and “a Mexican”.

Some of the billionaire's supporters in Sacramento were willing to overlook past business controversies involving the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.

“If you really scrutinise a lot of successful businesspeople, there are going to be particular areas that may not be A-plus,” said vineyard owner Bob Fraser (64).

“You take the good with the bad,” said Joseph Young (18), soon to be a university politics student who will be voting for Trump in his first election.

One person not losing money as a result of the billionaire was Royce Vaughn (44), from St Louis, who has been selling Trump T-shirts, caps and other campaign merchandise at some 80 rallies across the US.

Vaughn has had his best sales in seven presidential elections, flogging T-shirts with 25 staff at the Sacramento event alone. He plans to build a “Hillary House of Horrors” for Trump’s general-election rallies.

“I like Trump’s bravado,” he said. “This is the American West cowboy thing in the American psyche that I think a lot of people around the world don’t quite understand.”

One person who did not understand it was Brian Buckmaster (49), a worker in an elderly care home in Sacramento. One of about 30 protesters at the rally, Buckmaster has abandoned the party he voted for in 2008 and 2012. He said that Trump would “take us to nuclear war”.

Trump received a boost today when the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan decided to endorse him.