Thursday, November 24, 2016

Trump's stand on different issues before election and now - CNN

* Trump has changed his tune on prosecuting Hillary Clinton, climate change and torture
* He's also said nice things about The New York Times

Washington (CNN)President-elect Donald Trump is sounding a different tune as he prepares to take on the mantle of the presidency.
The brash businessman has already begun to step away from some of his rhetoric and promises he made during the presidential campaign -- ranging from how he'll treat Hillary Clinton to what he can accomplish with Congress.
Story highlights
* Trump has changed his tune on prosecuting Hillary Clinton, climate change and torture
* He's also said nice things about The New York Times

Washington (CNN)President-elect Donald Trump is sounding a different tune as he prepares to take on the mantle of the presidency.
The brash businessman has already begun to step away from some of his rhetoric and promises he made during the presidential campaign -- ranging from how he'll treat Hillary Clinton to what he can accomplish with Congress.



*
Here's Donald Trump then and now.
On investigating Hillary Clinton
Trump repeatedly bashed Clinton's use of a private email server during his campaign, ticking down a list of alleged misconduct and repeatedly arguing that Clinton should be behind bars as his supporters erupted in "Lock her up!" chants.


Trump flips, now opposes prosecution for Clinton
Trump aide: No plan to pursue charges against Clinton
Trump then: "If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor," he said at the second presidential debate last month. He added that she'd be "in jail" if he were president.
Trump now: "I want to move forward, I don't want to move back. And I don't want to hurt the Clintons. I really don't. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all," Trump told The New York Times on Tuesday. "It's just not something that I feel very strongly about."
On climate change
Donald Trump called climate change a "hoax" invented by the Chinese before launching his presidential campaign
Trump then: In a March interview with the Washington Post's editorial board, he said, "I think there's a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I'm not a great believer...I'm not a big believer in man-made climate change."


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Undeniable climate change facts 02:24
And in May, he said he would "cancel" the Paris climate change accord.
Trump now: "I have an open mind to it," he told the Times on the Paris deal. "We're going to look very carefully. I have a very open mind."
Asked about the scientific consensus on a connection between human activity and climate change, he added: "I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it's going to cost our companies."
On Obamacare
One of Trump's core campaign promises was his pledge to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, which he repeatedly dubbed a "disaster" during the campaign. Now, it seems like things aren't so clear cut.
Trump then: "Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing Obamacare," he said on the eve of the election.
Trump now: "Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced," Trump told The Wall Street Journal, praising several provisions of the law he said he intends to keep, such as coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions and for adults under 26 who would like to stay on their parents' health care plans.
"I like those very much," he said of those provisions.
On waterboarding
Trump repeatedly argued the US should take a more aggressive approach to combating terrorism, including bringing back the use of the controversial torture tactic known as waterboarding.
Trump then: "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," he said in a GOP debate February 6. And even in the last week of his presidential campaign, Trump bemoaned criticism of waterboarding, saying "we have to be pretty vicious."


Sen. Tom Cotton: Trump ready to make tough decisions
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Sen. Tom Cotton: Trump ready to make tough decisions 00:56
Trump now: He now seems to be changing his mind after talking with retired Gen. James Mattis, a leading candidate to become secretary of defense.
"(Mattis) said -- I was surprised -- he said, 'I've never found it to be useful.' He said, 'I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.' And I was very impressed by that answer," Trump told the Times.
"Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we're not allowed to waterboard. But I'll tell you what, I was impressed by that answer. It certainly does not -- it's not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it's so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that."
On South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley:
Trump has been meeting with a slew of his former critics as he looks to build his administration. And he's even making room for those critics in his administration.
Trump then: "The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!" he tweeted in March.
Trump now: Wednesday, Trump picked her as his ambassador to the United Nations.
On the New York Times


Donald Trump meets with New York Times
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Donald Trump meets with New York Times 02:18
The newspaper was one of Trump's prime targets for ridicule and attack during his campaign rallies.
Trump then: "No media is more corrupt than the failing New York Times."
Trump now: "I will say, The Times is, it's a great, great American jewel. A world jewel."



Trump, in Interview, Moderates Views but Defies Conventions - New York Times

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.

But in a wide-ranging hourlong interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times — which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules — Mr. Trump was unapologetic about flouting some of the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.

He said he had no legal obligation to establish boundaries between his business empire and his White House, conceding that the Trump brand “is certainly a hotter brand than it was before.” Still, he said he would try to figure out a way to insulate himself from his businesses, which would be run by his children.

He defended Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, against charges of racism, calling him a “decent guy.” And he mocked Republicans who had failed to support him in his unorthodox presidential campaign.

In the midday meeting in the 16th-floor boardroom of The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Mr. Trump seemed confident even as he said he was awed by his new job. “It is a very overwhelming job, but I’m not overwhelmed by it,” he said.

He displayed a jumble of impulses, many of them conflicting. He was magnanimous toward Mrs. Clinton, but boastful about his victory. He was open-minded about some of his positions, uncompromising about others.

The interview demonstrated the volatility in Mr. Trump’s positions.

He said he had no interest in pressing for Mrs. Clinton’s prosecution over her use of a private email server or for financial acts committed by the Clinton Foundation. “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” he said.

President-elect Donald J. Trump met with journalists from the newsroom and opinion staff at The New York Times on Tuesday. Here are some of the issues discussed at the meeting. By YARA BISHARA and NICOLE FINEMAN on Publish Date November 22, 2016.
On the issue of torture, Mr. Trump suggested he had changed his mind about the value of waterboarding after talking with James N. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, who headed the United States Central Command.

“He said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful,’” Mr. Trump said. He added that Mr. Mattis found more value in building trust and rewarding cooperation with terrorism suspects: “‘Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I’ll do better.’”

“I was very impressed by that answer,” Mr. Trump said.

Torture, he said, is “not going to make the kind of a difference that a lot of people are thinking.”

Mr. Trump repeated that Mr. Mattis was being “seriously, seriously considered” to be secretary of defense. “I think it’s time, maybe, for a general,” he said.

On climate change, Mr. Trump refused to repeat his promise to abandon the international climate accord reached last year in Paris, saying, “I’m looking at it very closely.” Despite the recent appointment to his transition team of a fierce critic of the Paris accords, Mr. Trump said that “I have an open mind to it” and that clean air and “crystal clear water” were vitally important.

He held out assurances that he did not intend to embrace extremist positions in some areas. He vigorously denounced a white nationalist conference last weekend in Washington, where attendees gave the Nazi salute and criticized Jews.

Asked about his antagonism with the news media and his vow to toughen libel laws, Mr. Trump offered no specifics but told the group, “I think you’ll be happy.”

Graphic: Donald Trump Is Choosing His Cabinet. Here’s the Latest Shortlist.
Despite his frequent attacks against what he has dubbed the “failing New York Times,” Mr. Trump seemed to go out of his way to praise the institution, which he called “a great, great American jewel, world jewel.” He did, however, say he believed The Times had been too tough on him during the campaign.

Pressed to respond to criticism in other areas, he was defiant. He declared that “the law’s totally on my side” when it comes to questions about conflict of interest and ethics laws. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he said.

He said it would be extremely difficult to sell off his businesses because they are real estate holdings. He said that he would “like to do something” and create some kind of arrangement to separate his businesses from his work in government. He noted that he had turned over the management of his businesses to his children, which ethics lawyers say is not sufficient to prevent conflicts of interest.

He insisted that he could still invite business partners into the White House for grip-and-grin photographs. He said that critics were pressuring him to go beyond what he was willing to do, including distancing himself from his children while they run his businesses.

“If it were up to some people,” he said, “I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.”

Mr. Trump did not dispute reports that he had used a meeting last week with Nigel Farage, the U.K. Independence Party leader, to raise his opposition to offshore wind farms. Mr. Trump has long complained that wind farms would mar the view from his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

“I might have brought it up,” Mr. Trump said, then argued he had done so because of policy concerns about wind farms rather than any personal interest.

Mr. Trump rejected the idea that he was bound by federal antinepotism laws from installing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a White House job. But he said he would want to avoid the appearance of a conflict and might instead seek to make Mr. Kushner a special envoy charged with brokering peace in the Middle East.

“The president of the United States is allowed to have whatever conflicts he or she wants, but I don’t want to do that,” Mr. Trump said. But he said that Mr. Kushner, who is an observant Jew, “could be very helpful” in reconciling the longstanding dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“I would love to be able to be the one that made peace with Israel and the Palestinians,” Mr. Trump said, adding that Mr. Kushner “would be very good at it” and that “he knows the region.”

“A lot of people tell me, really great people tell me, that it’s impossible — you can’t do it,” Mr. Trump added. “I disagree. I think you can make peace.”

“I have reason to believe I can do it,” he added.

Mr. Trump spoke only in general terms about foreign policy. He said the United States should not “be a nation builder,” repeated his line from the campaign that fighting the war in Iraq was “one of the great mistakes in the history of our country,” and said he has some “very definitive” and “strong ideas” about how to deal with the violent civil war raging in Syria. He declined to say what those ideas are despite several requests to do so.

“We have to end that craziness that’s going on in Syria,” he said.

The president-elect said that he had talked with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since winning the election, but he did not elaborate. He said it would be “nice” if he and Mr. Putin could get along, but he rejected the idea that any warming of relations would be called a “reset,” noting the criticism that Mrs. Clinton received after her attempts at bettering relations between the countries failed.

“I wouldn’t use that term after what happened,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump made a forceful defense of Mr. Bannon, whom he named as his chief strategist and who has drawn charges of racism and anti-Semitism. This summer, Mr. Bannon called Breitbart News, the website he led, “the platform for the alt-right,” a white nationalist movement.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Bannon had been dismayed at the reaction to his hiring.

“I’ve known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist or alt-right,” he said, “I wouldn’t even think about hiring him.”

Graphic: 20 Things Donald Trump Said He Wanted to Get Rid of as President
Mr. Trump added: “I think he’s having a hard time with it because it’s not him. I think he’s been treated very unfairly.”

He also defended Breitbart, which has carried racist and anti-Semitic content, saying it was no different from The Times, only “much more conservative.”

Mr. Trump said he hoped to develop a “great long-term relationship” with President Obama, with whom he said he had an unexpected rapport. “I really liked him a lot, and I am a little bit surprised that I am telling you that I really liked him a lot,” he said.

And Mr. Trump gloated about defying the polls and the expectations of his own party to win the presidency, and boasted of how he had taken his revenge on Republicans who kept him at a distance and then lost their own races.

He said that one of them, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, would “love to have a job in the administration.”

“I said, ‘No, thank you,’” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Ayotte, who lost her Senate seat to Gov. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. “She refused to vote for me.”

He also criticized Representative Joe Heck of Nevada, who vacillated over supporting Mr. Trump after an 11-year-old recording surfaced in which Mr. Trump bragged in lewd terms about grabbing women without their consent.

“He went down like a lead balloon,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Heck. “I said, ‘Off the record, I hope you lose.’”

He said Republican leaders felt indebted to him for his surprise victory.

“Right now,” Mr. Trump said, “they’re in love with me.”



Remember Jim DeMint? His Fingerprints Are All Over the Trump Transition - Daily Intellegencer

November 23, 2016
4:01 p.m.
Remember Jim DeMint? His Fingerprints Are All Over the Trump Transition
By Ed Kilgore

Donald Trump’s campaign, transition operation, and presumably the administration to follow have given us all a chance to stretch our minds and contemplate policies and policy-makers we would not have imagined taking over Washington. There is no modern precedent for someone with Stephen Bannon’s background and position on the ideological spectrum holding a top White House position. Attorney general designee Jeff Sessions was famously rejected for a mere district-court judgeship by a Republican-controlled Senate. Trump himself tried to convince the United Kingdom to make the fringe nationalist politician Nigel Farange Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the U.S. — via Twitter, no less! Each day brings new marvels and new perspectives on what we used to regard as normalcy.

A good example is that a man who was once, and not that long ago, the epitome of conservative extremism has become a reassuring éminence grise overlooking the Trump transition.

That would be Heritage Foundation president and former U.S. senator Jim DeMint. Once a lonely crank in the Senate (much like soon-t0-be Attorney General Sessions, as a matter of fact), DeMint became a powerful ideological commissar whose Senate Conservatives Fund helped push the GOP to the right during the early stages of the Obama presidency. Upon leaving the Senate for Heritage in 2013, DeMint turned the venerable right-wing think tank into a powerful force for immoderation via its Heritage Action arm, which vigorously promoted conservative brinkmanship in Congress and around the country.

Up until now it has probably been safe to say that DeMint had turned Heritage into a bulwark of what one might call the Ted Cruz brand of militant movement conservatism. But Heritage’s fingerprints are all over the Trump transition operation, per Politico:

[T]he transition is getting an assist from Heritage Foundation officials including Becky Norton Dunlop, a distinguished fellow at the foundation; former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, a distinguished fellow emeritus at Heritage; Heritage national security expert James Carafano; and Ed Feulner, who helped found Heritage. Rebekah Mercer, a Heritage board member and major pro-Trump donor, is on the transition team’s 16-member executive committee, and a transition team source said she is working with Heritage to recruit appointees for positions at the undersecretary level and below….
The transition team also includes other prominent activists and thinkers with close ties to Heritage, such as former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the activist involved with several conservative groups who is running Trump’s domestic transition team. He has written for Heritage and has personal relationships with many at the organization.
Heritage’s chummy relationship with Team Trump appears to have been initially brokered by DeMint himself, who met with the mogul soon after his nomination became likely. Even more significant, Heritage worked with the Federalist Society to put together Trump’s list of pre-vetted Supreme Court possibilities, perhaps the single most important step Trump took to keep serious conservatives in his camp.

Heritage also has a long history in the transition biz. It emerged from obscurity in 1980 when it offered the new Reagan administration detailed policy recommendations and vetted countless personnel.



So DeMint’s Heritage is an institution well-suited to “normalize” Trump’s new administration, perhaps especially because it is headed by a pol who once drew some odd looks himself. It’s appropriate that Governor Nikki Haley, a pol who emerged from the “movement conservative” faction of the South Carolina Republican Party headed by DeMint and Mark Sanford, may now serve the same “normalizing” function for Trump at the United Nations.