Tag: flip-flop

In Major Reversal, Trump Says China ‘Not Currency Manipulators’

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President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he no longer believes China manipulates its currency, a complete shift from the position he repeatedly took during his 2016 campaign.

“They’re not currency manipulators,” Trump told the the Wall Street Journal during an Oval Office interview.

The reason he changed his mind, the president said, was because China has stopped manipulating its currency in recent months and the accusations could jeopardize U.S. negotiations with China to deal with the nuclear threat from North Korea.

Trump’s flip flop comes just days after the president hosted his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at Mar-a-Lago in southern Florida.

Throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would instruct his Treasury Secretary to label China “a currency manipulator.” And as recently as 10 days ago, he told the Financial Times that China was the “world champion” of currency manipulators.

The official label would need to be included in a semiannual Treasury report expected this month.

(h/t NBC News)

Trump’s Budget Director Convinced Him to Cut Key Program Because ‘He Didn’t Know’ What It Did

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President Donald Trump’s proposed budget contained a lot of cuts to key programs that help Trump’s own voters, such as the Appalachian Regional Commission that has been responsible for helping slash high poverty rates in rural America.

In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said that he was able to convince Trump to slash the Appalachian Regional Commission and similar programs in his proposed budget because he had no idea what the program did.

“My guess is he probably didn’t know what the Appalachian Regional Commission did,” Mulvaney said of Trump. “I was able to convince him, ‘Mr. President, this is not an efficient use of the taxpayer dollars. This is not the best way to help the people in West Virginia.’ He goes, ‘Okay, that’s great. Is there a way to get those folks the money in a more efficient way?’ And the answer is yes. And that’s what’s we’re going focus on doing.”

Harwood then asked Mulvaney if Trump was aware that his budget cuts might hurt his own voters — and Mulvaney responded that the best way to help all voters was to spur higher economic growth.

“I think what the president will tell you is, ‘The best thing I can do for those folks, whether or not they voted for me, is to figure out a way to get 3.5 percent economic growth,’” he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mulvaney said he’s working on getting Trump on board with making some changes to Social Security, including the disability benefits program, which he said has “become effectively a long-term unemployment, permanent unemployment program.”

(h/t Raw Story)

Trump Saves Carrier Jobs at Expense of Taxpayers

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump visited a factory in Indiana on Thursday to kick off a “thank you tour” for his election win and celebrate persuading air conditioner maker Carrier Corp to preserve around 1,000 jobs in the state rather than move them to Mexico.

The Republican businessman toured the plant in Indianapolis and shook hands with workers on an assembly line. He was due to make remarks there later in the day.

In an early victory for Trump before he takes office on Jan. 20, Carrier said this week it agreed to keep more than 1,000 jobs at the plant and at its headquarters, while still planning to move more than 1,000 other U.S. jobs to Mexico.

Trump made keeping jobs in the United States one of the main issues of his election campaign and frequently pilloried Carrier for planning to ship jobs overseas as he appealed to blue-collar workers in the Midwest.

Though the company is still outsourcing Indiana jobs to Mexico, the deal marks a quick win for Trump, who has spent most of his time since the Nov. 8 election in New York building his team ahead of the handover of power from President Barack Obama.

Carrier confirmed that Indiana agreed to give the company $7 million in tax incentives. A source briefed on the matter said the tax incentives are over 10 years and the company has agreed to invest $16 million in the state, which is run by Governor Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president-elect.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller told reporters the Carrier deal is proof that “this administration is going to make good on our promises to keep jobs here in America.”

But Carrier, a unit of United Technologies Corp (UTX.N),

still plans to move 600 jobs from the plant to Mexico, the Wall Street Journal said. Reuters reported earlier this week Carrier also still intends to close a factory in Huntington, Indiana, that employs 700 people making controls for heating, cooling and refrigeration and move the jobs to Mexico by 2018.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who lost the Democratic primary to Clinton, said the Carrier deal is incomplete and leaves the incoming Trump administration open to threats from companies.

“Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives,” Sanders wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece on Thursday.

He noted that Trump had originally said he would save 2,100 jobs that Carrier planned to move to Mexico.

“Let’s be clear: It is not good enough to save some of these jobs,” Sanders said.

Despite Trump’s deal, employers elsewhere in Indiana are laying off five times that many workers because of foreign competition.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim said on Thursday that if Trump succeeds as U.S. president, it would benefit major trading partner Mexico because of increased employment and U.S. economic growth.

(h/t Reuters)

Reality

Trump will be called a hero from his supports for saving 1,100 jobs, while completely ignoring that the salaries will be paid for almost entirely by the taxpayers of Indiana.

Instead of taxing Carrier to prevent jobs from leaving, as Trump promised during the campaign, instead he is doing the exact opposite by giving them millions of dollars in tax cuts at the state level, while the company’s top five executives are still making more than $50 million dollars a year each.

Trump Flips, Now Opposes Prosecution for Clinton

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During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton, would join crowds of his supporters in chants of “lock her up!” and said to her face during a debate that if he were president, “you’d be in jail.”

But now that he actually will be president, Trump says he won’t recommend prosecution of Clinton, who he told New York Times reporters has “suffered greatly.”
What’s more, he said the idea of prosecuting Clinton is “just not something I feel very strongly about.”

The quotes come from the tweets of New York Times reporters Mike Grynbaum and Maggie Haberman, who attended a meeting between the President-elect and reporters and editors at the paper.

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump said, according to the tweets. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”
It’s a stunning departure from the campaign rhetoric, which could come as a shock to some of the President-elect’s most ardent supporters. The Times characterized one exchange as extending an olive branch to Clinton supporters.

“I think I will explain it that we, in many ways, will save our country,” he said.

He said the issues have been investigated “ad nauseum” and he added, according to Haberman, that people could argue the Clinton Foundation has done “good work.”

The about-face on his formal rival and suggestion that the Trump administration will not pursue further investigations of Clinton related to her private email server or the Clinton Foundation first came Tuesday morning from Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who said it would send a message to other Republicans.

“I think when the President-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to fellow Republicans, Conway said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

At the second presidential debate in early October, Trump threatened Clinton, saying that “if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.”

Conway said Clinton “still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy,” but added that “if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing to do.”

“Look, I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” she added.

Steve Vladeck, CNN legal contributor and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said it was unusual for a President-elect to take such a public position on whether to pursue an investigation.

“Even though the attorney general reports to the president, the Department of Justice is meant to exercise a degree of independence from the White House entirely to avoid the perception that political considerations, rather than legal ones, are behind decisions to (or to not) prosecute,” Vladeck said in an email. “Indeed, we’ve seen plenty of scandals throughout American history in which presidents have wrongly politicized the Justice Department’s role, and President-Elect Trump’s comments don’t exactly augur well for preservation of the line between law and politics over the next four years.”

Despite Trump breaking a campaign promise to some of the most fervent anti-Clinton supporters, Democrats also took issue with the decision as a sign of the President-elect’s executive overreach.

“That’s not how this works. In our democracy, the President doesn’t decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on Twitter.

During Trump’s ferocious election fight with Clinton, chants of “lock her up” — referring to Clinton — became a refrain of the Republican’s campaign, as he hammered the Democratic presidential nominee over her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state, and lobbed accusations of corruption and “pay to play” politics at the Clinton Foundation. Trump’s choice for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, also led a high-profile chant at the Republican National Convention of “lock her up.”

Trump repeatedly brought up jailing Clinton on his own, often at raucous campaign rallies over the summer and into the fall.

“Remember I said I was a counter-puncher? I am,” Trump said at a San Jose, California, rally in June, referencing an anti-Trump speech Clinton gave. “After what she said about me today, her phony speech, that was a phony speech. It was a Donald trump hit job. I will say this: Hillary Clinton has to go to jail, OK? (Cheers) She has to go to jail, phony hit job. She’s guilty as hell.”

“She gets a subpoena, she deleted the emails, she has to go to jail,” Trump said at a Lakeland, Florida, rally in October.

But in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and CBS’ “60 Minutes” after the election, Trump refused to say if he would fulfill that commitment to appoint a special prosecutor.

“I’m going to think about it,” he told “60 Minutes.” “I feel I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on health care, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. And I want to focus on — all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.” He told the program she “did some bad things” but added the Clintons are “good people.”

And Trump told the Wall Street Journal that “it’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform.”

(h/t CNN)

Repeal Obamacare? Maybe Not, Says Trump

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The “repeal” of Obamacare had been the top priority for the incoming Trump administration in the chaotic week after his surprise win.

Maybe not so much now.

The president-elect has a Republican-dominated House and Senate in Congress to help him try, but experts say full repeal won’t be so easy. And it may not be what the new administration even wants now.

The Trump transition team posted a policy website with a skeleton rundown of priorities.

“A Trump Administration will work with Congress to repeal the ACA (Affordable Care Act)and replace it with a solution that includes Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and returns the historic role in regulating health insurance to the states,” it reads.

But Trump told the Wall Street Journal he would consider keeping two of its most popular provisions — one that allows adult children to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans, and another that would forbid insurance companies from refusing to cover “pre-existing conditions.”

“I like those very much,” the newspaper quoted Trump as saying Friday.

The Obama administration is still talking up the law, announcing via Twitter on Thursday that 100,000 people signed up for coverage on the “Obamacare” exchanges on Wednesday, the day after the election.

The ACA, widely known as Obamacare, has been the signature achievement of Obama’s two terms. It sought to transform the unruly, expensive and inefficient U.S. health care system by stopping what were widely considered insurance company abuses, such as dumping people when their health conditions got too expensive to cover and refusing to pay for pre-existing conditions.

The ACA requires health insurance companies to pay for cancer screenings, wellness checks and vaccinations with no co-pay, and it allows children to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26.

It puts into place gradual incentives to move from a system where people pay piecemeal for health treatments and, instead, reward doctors and hospitals for keeping patients well and managing their diseases. And most of all, it sought to provide health insurance to the 15 percent of Americans who did not have it before the law passed.

It’s gone a long way to doing that. Only 8.9 percent of Americans now lack health insurance.

Republicans actually like many of these aspects of Obamacare, which was loosely based on Mitt Romney’s plan for Massachusetts when he was the Republican governor there.

“The Administration recognizes that the problems with the U.S. health care system did not begin with — and will not end with the repeal of — the ACA,” the new Trump policy statement reads.

Much of the public debate has come because the average person does not understand what Obamacare does and what it doesn’t do, said Timothy Jost, an emeritus professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and an expert on health care.

“Frankly, everything that has gone wrong with the health care system for the past six years has been blamed on Obamacare,” Jost said. “Everything that goes wrong with the health care system for the next four years will be blamed on Trump care. People who think we can just repeal Obamacare and everything will be great are in for a very, very, very rude surprise.”

Unlikely to lose coverage in 2017

For one thing, the Trump administration is going to worry about the political risks of leaving 20 million people suddenly without health insurance.

“The number of uninsured is expected to grow to about 50 million people with ‘repeal and replace’,” PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says in a report released this week. “Trump’s challenge will be to lower that number through his replacement proposals.”

Trump cannot do much alone.

“The White House is just one part of a much larger machine. To really put his stamp on health policy, Trump must work with a patchwork of federal lawmakers, regulatory agencies, trade and advocacy groups, and the Supreme Court. These institutions will either accelerate or decelerate Trump’s agenda,” PwC said.

The people who now have coverage on the exchanges — including people signing up right now during open enrollment — are unlikely to lose their coverage in the coming year, experts from all political viewpoints agree.

“The new administration is going to want to do something fast to show that they are keeping their promise to fundamentally change the federal role in the health care system,” said Michael Sparer, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University.

One thing a new Republican administration could do immediately is drop appeals against last May’s federal court ruling that said the Obama administration was illegally paying insurance companies to help keep health insurance costs down for low-income clients.

These so-called cost sharing reductions reimburse health insurers for charging lower co-pays and deductibles for more than 60 percent of Obamacare customers. Congress refused to allocate money to do that, and a federal district judge ruled in May that the administration couldn’t spend that money. The federal government kept on doing so while it appealed.

Symbolic moves

A new administration could stop fighting that right away, although it’s not a particularly sexy issue for voters. And it might irritate health insurance companies, Jost said.

“I don’t think anyone disagrees that it would be the insurers left holding the bag,” Jost told NBC News.

A new administration could also stop fighting lawsuits against the mandate that employers pay for birth control for women covered under their insurance plans, Sparer said. That might be popular with conservatives who said the requirement forced them to violate their religious beliefs.

There could be symbolic moves, also. The new Republican-led Congress may immediately vote on a repeal that will almost certainly be stopped by a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. While the Democrats do not have a majority in the Senate, they have enough seats to stop some legislation with a filibuster.

“I think the only grand gesture they can make is to blame Democrats for filibustering their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” said Jost.

Sparer agreed that is likely. Republicans could campaign to get more seats in the Senate in the 2018 elections. “That gives them a couple of years to think about what the replacement plan they want to come up with is,” Sparer said.

A new Trump Health and Human Services Department could also stop promoting open enrollment onto the Obamacare exchanges, which closes at the end of January —10 days after Inauguration Day. Enrollment usually spikes right at the deadline, and simply stopping outreach could hit numbers.

In fact, doing nothing could accomplish a lot, said Jost.

“It has been a full court press by the Obama administration since 2010 to get this thing implemented and it has taken a Herculean effort,” Jost said. “As soon as it stops moving forward, it could start moving backward pretty quickly. Almost just by doing nothing there could be some very negative effects.”

Tevi Troy, president of the American Health Policy Institute, says Republicans plan to use the budget process to tweak the law. “I would look to the reconciliation package,” he told NBC News. “This is the mechanism for how we move forward on this.”

Re-branding with a new plan

Budget issues can pass the Senate with a simple majority, bypassing Democrats who may object, although they must go through a lengthy process involving committees.

Troy said the GOP has been discussing ways to provide a transition period so as not to throw the health insurance and health care industries into chaos.

“What I always hear is that Republicans have no plans on replacing the Affordable Care Act. I think that is not only untrue, but unfair,” Troy said.

An immediate target may be the unpopular exchanges, the web-based system for buying health insurance. Troy says they are unnecessary, and changing them up would be an easy way for Republicans to re-brand Obamacare. “People can get health care without exchanges,” he said.

Trump has put forward the idea of allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines, and Troy said that could lower costs by creating more competition, although it will be a messy task to undertake since insurance is now firmly regulated by states.

Trump’s also advocated the use of health savings accounts and tax credits to help people pay for health insurance, although experts such as Jost say it’s not clear how those would help low-income people.

The mandate to buy health insurance is another obvious target for a new administration, even though Republicans originally supported the idea. It’s there to try to ensure that enough healthy people buy health insurance so that companies can profitably pay for the sick, but it’s been seen as onerous.

And it hasn’t worked well as an incentive, said Caroline Pearson of consultancy Avalere Health. Simply dropping enforcement of the mandate would be popular and easy, while causing little damage to existing coverage.

(h/t NBC News)

Trump Says Fed Policy He Supported is Now a Partisan Conspiracy

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In May, Donald Trump thought the Federal Reserve handled interest rates exactly right.

“Right now I am for low interest rates, and I think we keep them low,” he told CNBC.

Today, he said Fed chair Janet Yellen’s interest rate decisions proved she was “obviously not independent” from the White House and was, in fact, a partisan conspirator out to help Democrats.

“It’s staying at zero because she’s obviously political and she’s doing what Obama wants her to do,” Trump told CNBC on Monday. “And I know that’s not supposed to be the way it is, but that’s why it’s low.”

In an interview last week with Reuters, Trump said the low rates had created a “false economy,” adding, “at some point the rates are going to have to change.”

What changed between May and today? Nothing. The Fed has the same policy of low interest rates that Trump gushed over just four months ago. They last voted to raise rates in December 2015, the first time in nearly a decade, although there’s speculation among analysts that they could raise them this month.

Like a lot of Trump’s flip-flops, it’s not clear what prompted the shift. But it’s hard to reconcile Trump’s comments from springtime, where he warned of terrible economic consequences from an interest rate hike, with his comments today.

Trump repeated his strong support for a low interest rate policy throughout his May interview with CNBC, warning that “one point more, even, is devastating” and that “we have to be very, very careful” about making changes as a result.

While he said he planned to replace Yellen when her term expired, he described her at that time as a kindred spirit on the issue.

“She is a low interest rate person, she has always been a low interest rate person, and I must be honest — I am a low interest rate person,” Trump told CNBC on May 5. “If we raise interest rates and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’re going to have very major problems.”

He gave Fortune a similar assessment in April, saying a rate increase would be “scary” for the economy.

“The best thing we have going for us is that interest rates are so low,” Trump said. “There are lots of good things that could be done that aren’t being done, amazingly.”

On Monday, those substantive arguments for low interest rates had disappeared in favor of wild accusations of shady behavior around the same course of action.

“She’s keeping them artificially low” to boost Obama, he said. “Watch what’s going to happen afterwards, it’s a very serious problem. And I think it’s very political. I think she’s very political. And to a certain extent, I think she should be ashamed of herself.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has lurched erratically between extremes on the issue. He also accused Yellen of refusing to raise rates for political reasons last November.

“Janet Yellen should have raised the rates,” Trump told reporters. “She’s not doing it because the Obama administration and the president doesn’t want her to.”

The Fed voted to raise rates the next month.

Bumps in the economy tend to hurt the party in power, and partisans often grumble around election time that low interest rates are helping incumbents. Already, markets have been shaky this week as investors increasingly believe the Fed might announce a rate increase, which could slow growth in the short term in order to guard against inflation.

Whatever his motive, Trump’s comments drew a brush-back from Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari, who is a Republican.

“Politics simply does not come up,” Kashkari said on CNBC Monday. “We look at the economic data and … everyone around the table is committed to achieving our dual mandate of employment and inflation.”

(h/t NBC News)

Reality

With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, Trump rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other Republican primary candidates.

After Reigniting His Immigration Tough Talk, Trump Flip-Flops Again on Softening

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Just hours after reviving his harsh rhetoric on immigration, Donald Trump on Thursday morning insisted that there is actually “quite a bit of softening” in how he’s approaching his signature campaign issue.

The Republican nominee’s latest comment — to conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham, no less — makes it even harder to pin down just where Trump is landing on the hot-button issue, and amplifies the pick-what-you-want-to-hear nature of his talk on immigration.

“You’re going to be asked this, so I might as well ask it,” Ingraham said to Trump during a radio interview. “The line last week [was] you were softening on immigration, then you come out with a very specific, very pro-enforcement plan last night. Where’s the softening?”

Passing on the chance to disavow the prior “softening” narrative, Trump insisted instead, “Oh, there’s softening. Look, we do it in a very humane way, and we’re going to see with the people that are in the country. Obviously I want to get the gang members out, the drug peddlers out, I want to get the drug dealers out. We’ve got a lot of people in this country that you can’t have, and those people we’ll get out.”

“And then we’re going to make a decision at a later date once everything is stabilized,” Trump continued. “I think you’re going to see there’s really quite a bit of softening.”

The comments came after Trump consoled grieving immigration hard-liners worried Trump was flirting with amnesty for undocumented immigrants, as he delivered a fiery speech that could have been ripped from his early campaign days.

Speaking from Phoenix after having visited with the Mexican president, Trump railed for nearly 90 minutes about how undocumented immigrants are hurting America. He promised to build his border wall, make Mexico pay for it, and to empower a massive new “deportation task force” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to round up undocumented immigrants.

“People will know that you can’t just smuggle in, hunker down, and wait to be legalized. Those days are over,” Trump declared.

“Wow. This doesn’t sound like ‘softening.’ GO, TRUMP!!!” tweeted conservative commentator Ann Coulter on Wednesday night.

“I think it’s arguably the best day of his campaign,” said Brent Bozell, a prominent conservative.

Trump’s hard-edged speech also managed to alienate several of his Hispanic supporters, who quickly distanced themselves from the Republican nominee.

“I was a strong supporter of Donald Trump when I believed he was going to address the immigration problem realistically and compassionately,” said Jacob Monty, a member of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council who has aggressively made the Latino case for Trump. “What I heard today was not realistic and not compassionate.”

But embedded in Trump’s speech, underneath all the bluster, was still some of the talk that days before had generated a flood of headlines that Trump was easing up on his severe immigration policies.

While Trump had previously threatened to use a deportation force to round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants, the billionaire on Wednesday night emphasized that his new deportation task force would focus on deporting criminals — an approach very similar to President Barack Obama’s.

“Our enforcement priorities will include removing criminals, gang members, security threats, visa overstays, public charges,” Trump said.

And he said that “anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” but he did not say that all undocumented immigrants would have to live in fear of having their door knocked on by his triple-strength ICE deportation team.

While much of Trump’s talk on immigration has been difficult to parse, some of the elements of Wednesday night’s speech sounded similar to his comments to Fox News’ Sean Hannity and CNN’s Anderson Cooper that landed him in hot water with conservatives last week.

“It’s a process. You can’t take 11 [million] at one time and just say ‘boom, you’re gone,'” Trump told Cooper last Thursday, as he defended his latest immigration comments. “I don’t think it’s a softening. I’ve had people say it’s a hardening, actually.”

Trump on Ingraham Thursday morning again paired his talk to being “very humane” with tougher talk of securing the border — throwing meat to conservatives and independents alike.

Trump added that he feels “strongly that we have to stabilize the border, we have to absolutely stabilize the border and we have to have a strong border, otherwise we don’t have a country.”

Later in the show, a caller tried to explain what Trump meant by those remarks, as conservatives continue to try to bend Trump’s comments to their liking.

“I don’t want people to freak out about that. He’s just talking about there’s not gonna be those Bill Clinton and Elian Gonzalez kid from Cuba-type stories going around, going into houses with machine guns and stuff,” a man from Florida said.

Ingraham concurred, adding her own interpretation in the process.

“Yeah, I think what he’s saying is the previous record of open border isn’t gonna exist, and you know, we’re not gonna be running around with vans, throwing people into vans, unless they’re hardened criminals,” she said. “And if you’re arrested for a crime, you can’t stay in the country. But the idea that you’re gonna just run around with vans and throw fruit-pickers into the back of the vans, that’s not gonna happen. So I think that’s what he was talking about.”

(h/t Politico)

Media

Trump’s Stunning Flip-Flop on Immigration

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The list of flip-flops that Donald Trump has made since descending an escalator in his namesake tower last year and into the presidential campaign continues to grow.

In the latest instance, he has described his change in tone on immigration as a “softening” of a stance he previously touted rather than a complete reversal.

Other issues on which he had different feelings before the presidential campaign include abortion and assault rifles. But the bigger surprises have come after he announced one stance early in the presidential campaign and then switched his position.

Trump has spoken throughout the campaign about his plans for a “deportation force,” but his campaign staff has indicated in recent days that such plans may not come to fruition exactly as previously described.

In November he mentioned a possible force to target unauthorized immigrants.

“You are going to have a deportation force, and you are going to do it humanely,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Now Trump has signaled that he’s adjusting his position.

“There certainly can be a softening, because we’re not looking to hurt people,” he said during a Fox News town hall event Tuesday, Aug. 23.

“We want people — we have some great people in this country. We have some great, great people in this country. But, so, we’re going to follow the laws of this country. What people don’t realize — we have very, very strong laws,” Trump said.

His comments stand in stark contrast to one of the more controversial portions of his presidential announcement in June 2015, when he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

(h/t ABC News)

Reality

With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, Trump rejected almost every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other Republican primary candidates.

In fact, Trump’s new proposal is nearly identical to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio’s positions during the Republican primaries.

Some other notable flip-flops by Trump include:

  • His ‘sarcasm’ about Obama’s being the ‘literal founder of ISIS.’
  • The ‘complete and total shutdown’ of Muslims entering the country became only the rich ones, then to a ‘ideological test.’
  • Changed his tax plan that obviously saved billionaires like him loads of money, to a new plan that would save billionaires like him some money.
  • During the primaries claimed he would self-fund, then during the general he now accepts big donations while still claiming self-funding.
  • Promised to protect the 2nd Amendment, then he has also repeatedly suggested that there should be some reforms, including an effort to stop people on the terrorist watch list from being able to get guns.
  • For years before running for President, Trump was a staunch pro-choice supporter, then switched to pro-life. During interviews he held the position that women who get abortions should face “some form of punishment” then changed to the doctor being punished, all while abortion being completely.
  • Said the minimum wage was “too high,” then we shouldn’t raise it, then we should raise it.
  • In September, Trump said that he would support asylum for refugees from Syria, given the circumstances in the country, then three weeks later reversed course.

Media

Trump Campaign Now Says Immigrant Deportation Force ‘To Be Determined’

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Donald Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday said that the creation of a “deportation force” for undocumented immigrants under a Trump administration was “to be determined.”

Throughout the Republican primary, Trump supported the forcible removal of the some 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the United States.

Last November, he called for a deportation force to do the job. In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said, “You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely.”

Trump has made the vilification of immigrants a central part of his campaign: from his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border (and claims that Mexico will “pay for it”) to his call to ban people who are Muslim from traveling to the United States. He made headlines in June for saying that an American-born judge presiding over a Trump University lawsuit could not be impartial because of the judge’s Hispanic ancestry.

But in August, his campaign convened a meeting of a new Hispanic advisory board. Speaking to NBC Latino of an “open-minded” Trump, Hispanic supporters who attended the meeting suggested the GOP candidate would unveil a new immigration plan that offered solutions beyond deportation.

In light of the meeting and apparent policy reversal, CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Conway, who was named Trump’s campaign manager just days ago, Sunday on whether Trump still supported launching the deportation force he called for during the primary.

Conway evaded the question twice, then responded, “To be determined.”

(h/t NBC News)

Reality

While Conway’s answer does not completely discount a deportation force, it does put it in to question, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

With the many other flip-flops since becoming the Republican party’s nominee, he’s rejected virtually every stance that his supporters loved which separated him from the other candidates during the primaries. How could Trump be taken at his word for anything anymore?

As we explained in our policy review of Trump’s immigration reform, mass deportations would involve rounding up every undocumented person and forcibly removing them from the country. What Trump is advocating here, the forced removal of a portion of a population with the same national heritage from an area, already has a name, it’s called “ethnic cleansing” and it is not seen as a positive and moral thing. On top of the horrific crimes against humanity being proposed, what Trump also fails to mention here is the cost. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told lawmakers that it costs about $12,500 to deport one immigrant from the United States. Multiply that by 11.3 million, and you get $141.3 billion.

Along with tripping the number of ICE agents and a nationwide E-Verify system, Trumps plan would be a giant middle finger to individual freedom and morality while costing the taxpayers over $160 billion.

Media

 

Trump Hides Fundraising By Mega-Donors

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Donald Trump has always insisted his campaign is self funded (it’s not) so he can’t be bought, but he has been accepting large donations from mega-donors while refusing to disclose who they are.

Over the weekend Trump attended two “high-dollar soirees” in Nantucket and Cape Cod, including one at the home of a Koch brother, William, where the co-hosts received six tickets to a VIP reception and photograph with the Republican nominee as thanks for raising at least $100,000. Because there is a $2,700 limit on contributions to political campaigns, fundraisers, referred to as “bundlers,” who can tap networks of friends and business associates for money are very valuable—individual contributions must be disclosed, but the only bundlers who must be identified are those who are also registered as federal lobbyists.

Outside of this being a major flip-flop on a key selling point to his supporters of self-funding, is the issue of a complete lack of transparency compared to his Democratic rival when it comes to fundraising bundlers.

Trump had not disclosed any such bundlers through June—or, actually, any at all. Clinton, meanwhile, has named 499 bundlers (including lobbyists) who have raised at least $100,000 for her campaign.

From Politico:

So far, Clinton’s political operation has outraised Trump, announcing a $90 million haul in July between her campaign and the Democratic Party. But Trump said last week that he had raised about $80 million between his campaign and various GOP committees, boasting, in particular, about the $64 million in smaller digital and direct-mail donations.

But despite Trump’s rhetorical focus on small-dollar contributors, he is still dependent on bundlers and six-figure political donors.

In his Trump Victory joint fundraising account, which raised $25 million from late May through the end of June, roughly half the funds came from only 25 families.

Throughout primary season, Trump boasted that he was “self-funding” his campaign, a claim that was only ever partially true, and to the extent that was true was only so because he couldn’t get the big establishment backers—at least at first—to support him.

Last year, when he was still working to denigrate Florida senator Marco Rubio, Trump tweeted, “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” But in May, Trump ate dinner with the conservative financier and his wife in Manhattan, and last month at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland he made sure to stop by their private suite at the Quicken Loans Arena.

“She’s totally controlled by the special interests,” Trump said of Clinton last week. Maybe so! But if she is, then so is he.

(h/t Gawker, Politico)

 

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