On October 10, Politico reported
when GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence was asked about Trump’s remarks on both appointing the prosecutor and jailing Clinton, the Indiana governor called them one of the highlights of the debate.
“I thought that was one of the better moments of the debate,” Pence said. “I’m old enough to remember a day when a president of the United States erased 18½ minutes and they ran him out of town. She used high technology to erase 33,000 emails. ...[She] really hasn’t been held to account for that. What Donald Trump said is no one is above the law.
Evidently, the big guy wasn't really serious about that. Apparently, some people are believed to be above the law, given that
President-elect Donald Trump conceded Tuesday that he probably won’t make good on his campaign pledge to pursue a new criminal investigation into his political rival, Hillary Clinton.
“It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about,” he said Tuesday afternoon in an on-the-record discussion with reporters from The New York Times.
Trump cast his reversal as a unifying move that, contrary to some of the early backlash, he believes won’t upset his supporters.
“I don't think they will be disappointed. I think I will explain it that we in many ways will save our country,” he said, adding that prosecuting Clinton “would be very, very divisive for the country.”
If not the prosecution of Hillary Clinton, at least we'll always have Paris... or at least The Wall.
Except that we may not, because when Lesley Stahl asked the President-elect on Sunday whether there would be "part wall, part fence," Trump responded "yeah, it could be- it could be some fencing."
Nevertheless, all illegal immigrants- or at least all who can be detained- will be deported.
Maybe not, however, for when Stahl asked "what about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?" Trump responded
What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.
There are constitutional limitations. Yet, if the 45th President will not retaliate against political rivals by throwing them in jail and will stress deporting illegal immigrants who have broken the law- as has the current President- couldn't we merely have kept Barack Obama in office another term and avoided the expense and aggravation of the presidential campaign?
But given that building the wall and prosecuting Clinton were arguably the most assertive (and controversial) promises of the Trump campaign, it shouldn't be surprising that the Liar-in-Chief is starting to walk back those pledges. In its place, however, President Trump is likely to pull what Talking Points Memo contributors identify as a bait-and-switch in which
The Koch policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, union busting, Medicare privatization, business deregulation, and evisceration of environmental and global warming measures is ripe to be rammed through a GOP-dominated Congress and sent to the desk of a president who needs Koch-affiliated personnel, understands very little about policy issues, and will be looking for victorious bills to sign into law. The stage is perfectly set to advance the core Koch ultra-free-market agenda, even though the brothers avoided endorsing Trump and the candidate himself discussed almost none of the relevant policy shifts in his appeals to voters.
As has been expected, Donald Trump will be a radically right-wing President. It's unlikely, however, that it will be in the manner expected and promised, but rather in the mold of the Koch brothers and allies Mike Pence and Paul Ryan.
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