Trump, Then And Now: What His Shifting Positions Say About What He Believes
Reporters ask lots of pesky questions during campaigns for a reason: to find out how someone would govern.
Most candidates right and left comply with the public interest in what they would do by putting out policy papers and laying out facts and figures, numbers and details.
Not Donald Trump. He likes to keep everyone guessing. And the country is now seeing just how much.
In the first couple of months of his presidency, he was governing like he campaigned — bombastic and trying to follow through on bold promises. Build the wall. Ban certain people. Bring back manufacturing jobs. He ordered that the wall be built (though the U.S. will pay for it and part of it might be a fence); he ordered a travel ban for people from six majority-Muslim countries (though it was seven at first, and it's still hung up in the courts); and, as for jobs, well, presidents always get too much credit and blame for that, but there's always the Carrier deal.
In just the past few days, however, Trump has reversed himself on a whole host of subjects — from NATO, China, Russia and Syria to health care, the Export-Import Bank, even Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen.
As the 100-day marker of Trump's presidency approaches, the shifting raises questions about what Trump really intends to do as president with the rest of his time in office. Does he even know? Or is he — and now the country — simply at the mercy of his instinctual whims and latest conversations?
Some of what Trump is doing is being billed as a movement toward the mainstream. For example:
- Reuters: "Trump won't rule out
