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Thursday, November 24, 2016

Trump's (Apparent) Flip-Flops

He's going a long way toward tempering the extreme positions he adopted during the campaign. Click here for an article at the WaPo by David Ignatius, entitled "Donald Trump pulls a bait and switch on America."
Of Obama, whom he had castigated and sought to undermine for years, he said, “I really liked him a lot” after a White House visit. Of Clinton, for whom his campaign prescription had been a special prosecutor and imprisonment, he said, “She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all.”

On the Paris agreement to reduce climate change, which he had threatened to tear up, Trump said he now has an “open mind” and sees “some connectivity” between climate change and human activity. About waterboarding, which he had advocated, he suddenly discovered Mattis’s wisdom that “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers” work better in getting information.
Ignatius says:
We know what’s going on here: Trump took inflammatory positions during the campaign, which appealed to people’s basest instincts and fears, because he thought they would help him get elected. He’s hardly the first modern politician to discover the utility of lying. Lyndon B. Johnson was a master at it. Bill Clinton wasn’t bad at it, either, even in front of a grand jury. Hillary Clinton could bend the truth, too, though hardly by Trumpian proportions.

What’s jarring here is that Trump’s wildly polarizing rhetoric put the nation through a nightmare campaign. He took raw wounds of race, class and gender and tore at them until they bled. He created the equivalent of a national panic attack. America is a strong country, but it’s a fragile one, too. Trump says he wants to put it back together, but the job will be harder because of the damage he did himself.
On the subject of prosecuting Clinton, he doesn't seem to understand that a president can't unilaterally decide to prosecute someone. He sometimes seems to think he's been elected emperor. Another WaPo article, entitled "Trump’s new interview with the New York Times isn’t reassuring. It’s deeply alarming," by Greg Sargent, cites an "expert" saying:
“Trump’s implicit assumption that he can direct the Department of Justice to prosecute Clinton — or not — demonstrates a dangerous assumption the president can dictate the department’s prosecutorial decisions. But the Department of Justice depends on its independence as the source of its authority and power.”

In other words, the underlying assumption seems to be that Trump also thinks he can dictate affirmative decisions to prosecute.
Of course, what I think is a wise attitude toward whatever Trump says: I'll believe it when I see it.

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