Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he's "clearly going to vote" for Donald Trump for president, calling Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, "unacceptable."
"The way I think of it is this," Rumsfeld said Wednesday night on Fox News Channel's On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. "On the Democrats' side, we have a known known. On the Republican side, we have a recent entry, who's a known unknown."
That line, of course, was a play on a famous series of statements uttered at a Pentagon briefing in February 2002 in response to a question about whether there was evidence Iraq had tried to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know," Rumsfeld said then. "We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know."
Trump, apparently, falls into the second category, according to Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld, who served as Defense secretary for both Presidents George W. Bush and Gerald Ford, went on to cite the reasons he found Clinton "unacceptable" for president, including her handling of the Benghazi attack in September 2012 and her use of a private email server to handle government information while serving as secretary of State.
As for Trump, Van Susteren asked Rumsfeld if he was endorsing or just supporting the presumptive GOP nominee, a distinction some Republicans have made in announcing their support of the real estate mogul.
“I don’t know that there’s any difference," but added: "No one asked me for my endorsement."
“I’m clearly going to vote for him," Rumsfeld said of Trump. "I just can’t imagine not.”
Trump tweeted Thursday morning that he "very much appreciated" the support of the former Defense secretary.
Alumni of the Ford national security team, however, clearly are not unanimous in their views of the 2016 race. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Ford andPresident George H.W. Bush, announced Wednesday in a statement that he was backing Clinton.