'Fundamentally unfit for the job': Hillary Clinton is about to deliver one of her most vehement critiques yet of Trump's foreign policy

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Hillary Clinton

REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event at Rutgers University's Newark campus in Newark, New Jersey, U.S., June 1, 2016.

Hillary Clinton is set to deliver a major foreign-policy speech in California on Thursday, and she'll focus much of it on setting herself apart from her likely rival in the 2016 election - Donald Trump.

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Clinton plans to cast Trump as different than any other nominee in recent history "fundamentally unfit" for the role of commander in chief.

"Clinton's critique will go beyond specific policies and she'll make clear that the choice in this election goes beyond partisanship: Donald Trump is unlike any presidential nominee we've seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job," Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser for the Clinton campaign, said in a memo sent to Business Insider.

Clinton will present herself as a level-headed alternative to the bombastic real-estate mogul who has: called for a ban on Muslims entering the US; suggested that South Korea and Japan should be able to obtain their own nuclear weapons; posited that the NATO alliance is now "obsolete"; and said he would "bomb the s--- out of" the terrorist group ISIS. Those ideas have come under constant scrutiny from both sides of the political aisles.

She'll project a "confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values - a strong contrast to Donald Trump's incessant trash-talking of America," according to Sullivan's memo.

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Clinton, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, has begun preparing for a likely general-election matchup with Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Trump's campaign has been built around the slogan "Make America Great Again" - he often tells voters that the US has been taken advantage of by other countries and needs a tough negotiator in the White House to restore America to its former glory. He has built his foreign policy on similar themes, promising an "America first" approach.

The Clinton campaign has been trying to tear down the perception of Trump as a tough businessman.

At a Wednesday rally, Clinton trained her fire on the for-profit school Trump University, which is the subject of several lawsuits. She called Trump a "fraud" and said he's "trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U." She's likely to use similar tactics in her foreign policy speech on Thursday to make the case against Trump as a protector of America's security.

"Clinton will speak extensively about the reasons why Donald Trump is unqualified to be our commander-in-chief," Sullivan said in the memo. "She will rebuke a litany of dangerous policies that Trump has espoused, ranging from nuclear proliferation to endorsing war crimes, from denouncing NATO to banning Muslims."

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