1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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The Post Policy Candidate
Donald Trump and the G.O.P. Debate: Policy Is Not His Point
He announced a “foolproof” plan to destroy the Islamic State, but said, “I’m not going to tell you what it is tonight.”
He proposed a “great wall” to keep out illegal immigrants, but changed his mind when he visited the Mexican border.
He donated $10,000 to re-elect Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, but in attacking Mr. Walker, blithely revealed that he had no idea of the governor’s record when he made the contribution.
Donald J. Trump, who will be at the center of the first Republican presidential debate Thursday night, may prove as elusive a target to his rivals as a puff of smoke.
That is because Mr. Trump’s popularity — his support in some polls is double that of his closest competitors — is built on his unfettered style, rather than on his positions, which have proved highly fungible.
He may be the first post-policy candidate.
Mr. Trump’s website, unlike those of nearly every other candidate, has no issues page. He has given no policy addresses. He has boasted that he is not spending time plowing through briefing books or practicing answers to imagined questions, the customary ways to prepare for a debate.
Yet many of Mr. Trump’s positions have an improvisational air, shifting in their specifics as he seems to dream them up or reconsider them on the fly and out loud, in free-associative speeches or shoot-from-the-hip interviews.
What some have called “Trumpism” is founded not on a specific agenda, like the bullet-point Contract With America in 1994 that led to the Republican takeover of the House.
Rather, it is built on boiling grass-roots anger over the ineffectiveness and scripted talking points of conventional politicians on matters like illegal immigration and America’s global power.
“Everybody in the establishment misunderstands the game he’s playing,” said Newt Gingrich, the author of the Contract With America and onetime House speaker who was himself a Republican presidential candidate in 2012. “His opponents want to talk about policies. He’s saying if you don’t have a leader capable of cutting through the baloney, all this policy stuff is an excuse for inaction.”
Anticipating the debate on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said, “I’d rather just discuss the issues.” But he added in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he would respond in kind if targeted by a rival. “If I’m attacked, I have to, you know, do something back, but I’d like it to be very civil,” he said.
Waffling, flip-flopping and inconsistencies, all of which might hobble a conventional candidate, have not dimmed Mr. Trump’s appeal to his Republican supporters.
He seemed to lose no ground as rivals and the news media pointed out the stark reversal in his ideology since he flirted with a presidential run in 1999. Back then, Mr. Trump supported abortion rights and a soak-the-rich tax on fortunes in excess of $10 million.
When another presidential contender, former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, called him “a cancer on conservatism” last month, pointing out Mr. Trump’s previous advocacy for single-payer health care and his support of Hillary Rodham Clinton, it was Mr. Perry, castigated on social media, who paid a price.
A senior adviser to Mr. Perry, Sam Clovis, the chairman of his campaign in Iowa, called Mr. Trump’s appeal “a cult of personality,” and faulted the news media for focusing on his inflammatory remarks and insults rather than on the substance of his candidacy. (On Tuesday, an online news site, Independent Journal Review, posted a compilation of video clips showing Mr. Trump delivering insults; it was 10 hours long.)
“When are the media going to start asking for specific solutions to specific problems?” Mr. Clovis asked in an interview. “I put that on you guys.”
Mr. Trump’s positions and history as a political changeling have begun to receive a vetting in the news media. Following up on his promise to replace the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific,” Bloomberg Politics dug into the somewhat vague details he had cited and concluded that his plan “sounds quite a bit like Obamacare.”
After Mr. Trump dodged Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on his plan to defeat the Islamic State, pleading, “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing,” he told Anderson Cooper of CNN, who also pressed him about the issue, that he would “bomb the hell” out of Iraqi oil fields held by the Islamic group.
Still, as a post-policy candidate, Mr. Trump may be somewhat impervious to being pinned down, whether by the news media or by his rivals.
Citing the danger that lurks for other Republicans in taking on Mr. Trump, a ferocious counterpuncher, some debate veterans speculated that his rivals would prefer to demur.
“My impression is every one of them will go in with a line or two ready to go, if Trump seizes upon them and they can’t ignore it without looking weak,” said Dan Senor, who helped Paul Ryan prepare for his 2012 vice-presidential debate with Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But I think they’re all hoping to not have to use it.”
Mr. Trump’s seeming mutability is not limited to his own positions; in Iowa recently, he said he had not known much about Mr. Walker’s record as governor before donating to his 2014 re-election. “I didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but he was fighting, and I like a fighter. Does that make sense?” Mr. Trump said.
Perhaps Mr. Trump’s most consistent policy stance has been his opposition to trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that he blames for the loss of blue-collar jobs. His proposal of a 35 percent tax on goods from Mexico and higher tariffs on Chinese imports is a ratcheting up, rather than a reversal, of positions he took more than a decade ago. (Back then, as an independent espousing liberal views, he called for a one-time 14.25 percent tax on fortunes above $10 million.)
His seizing on trade and immigration in this campaign has allowed Mr. Trump to tap into the economic anxieties of American workers who have lost out in the global economy, and to capitalize on nativist fears.
Which makes attacking him on those issues, above all, a risky proposition in a Republican primary debate.
“This is a guy who’s saying some outrageous, but not inaccurate, things many people feel,” Mr. Senor said.
“I don’t think it’s any candidate’s best interest in trying to take him down.”
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
Offline
- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: The Post Policy Candidate
Wait until the Base finally sits down and looks at issues.
They will discover that Trump is actually a political moderate.
Oh boy,,,,,,,,,,,,
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- •
Thread Starter- Rongone
- Sentient Being
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- Registered: 1/31/2015
- Posts: 2,872
Re: The Post Policy Candidate
Can you say "Wishy Washy"?
A Political History of Donald Trump's Publicity (1987-2011)
In a campaign-style appearance in Boca Raton Saturday, Donald Trump told the Tea Party crowd that he's a real conservative--he's anti-tax, pro-life, pro-gun, and will "fight to get rid of Obamacare." Three elderly people fainted at the rally. We hope they swooned for the April sun, not at Trump's convictions. It shouldn't be a surprise that Trump has latched onto the far-right's birtherism. As he enters his fourth decade as a professional attention seeker, Trump has a long record of saying just about anything that will win him headlines. Especially when it strikes a cultural or political nerve.
It's not even the first time that Trump has flirted with running for office as part of his brand: Way back in 1987, for example, he started buying full-page ads in newspapers in which he opined on national issues. Two weeks after a jogger in Central Park was brutally raped and left in a coma, he took out full-page ads in several newspapers calling for the death penalty for the "savages." (Contrary to Trump's assertion that he's always been cool with "the blacks," some said the ad was race-baiting.) There was another set that ran in the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post (at a personal cost of $95,000) which proclaimed, "There's nothing wrong with America that a little backbone can't cure," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. His flack tried to stoke a little political speculation by denying any plan to run for mayor, governor or Senator but added that Trump "will not comment about the presidency." In 2000, Trump wrote a faux presidential campaign book, The America We Deserve, which Slate's Dave Weigel actually bothered to read, in which Trump claimed that he was ready to lead America towards socialism (or at least single payer health care, just like they have up in Canada).
It's worth remembering that 2012 is not the first time Trump's nose for publicity has drawn him into the political arena. But it is rather remarkable that our political landscape (that is, the Republican voters who keep telling pollsters they're eager to vote for a strident birther like Trump) is ready to welcome him. So, drawn from Trump's other political non-campaigns of the last quarter century, here is a history of Trump on the issues.
Health Care:
2000: "We must have universal healthcare... Doctors might be paid less than they are now, as is the case in Canada, but they would be able to treat more patients because of the reduction in their paperwork... The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans. There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labor to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees. If the program were in place in Massachusetts in 1999 it would have reduced administrative costs by $2.5 million. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.
2011: "I will fight to get rid of Obamacare, which is a total disaster."
The Budget:
1987: "The fact is we don't need a tax increase. We should have a tax decrease. We should have Japan and we should have Saudi Arabia and we should have all of these countries who are literally ripping us off left and right. . . . They should pay for our $200-billion deficit." [Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1987],
2000: "By imposing a one-time 14.25 percent net-worth tax on the richest individuals and trusts, we can put America on sound financial footing for the next century. ... The plan would cost me $700 million personally in the short term, but it would be worth it."
2011: “I think hundreds of millions of dollars of money, and let’s call it tax money, could come from other countries when we stop them from ripping us off... As an example, we are protecting South Korea from North Korea... Why aren’t they paying for this protection? ... So, when you look at a hundred other items just like this, hundreds of millions of dollars could come in, so you wouldn’t have to play around with Medicaid and Medicare, and things that are really dear to people’s hearts."
Global Trade:
1987: "The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces... But when the negotiations are over, it is my belief . . . they laugh like hell." [The Miami Herald, October 23, 1987]
1987: "Let's not kid ourselves. We're supporting Saudi Arabia. We're supporting Kuwait. We're bringing in ships to Kuwait through the gulf. We're losing our men. We're spending billions of dollars. So what's happening? They don't contribute one penny of this defense." [Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1987]
1988: After buying a yacht that once belonged to a Saudi Arabian businessman: "This country has been taken advantage of by every country in the world, especially our allies, like Japan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. So I look at this ship as one of the great jewels of the world, and as an American I'm proud to have pulled it back here. This yacht was considered a jewel, the jewel of Monte Carlo, and I think Americans should have the jewels, should go out and buy the jewels of the world, because we're a great country." [The (Canada) Globe and Mail, July 8, 1988]
2011: "The United States has become the laughing stock and the whipping post for the rest of the world, whether we like it or not, and we don't like it, the world is laughing at us.. ... I know a lot of people in other countries. I know the top people. I know the wealthy people. They deal with me on a constant basis... They would sit with me at dinners and say 'Donald we can't believe what we're getting away with.'"
Military Policy
2008: Criticizing President George W. Bush, Trump said, "He'd go into a country... attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, and just do it because he wanted to do it."
2011: "In the old days, when we won a war, we won a war. ...You keep the nation, you keep the land, you keep the oil. ... I'm only interested in Libya if, again, we get the oil."