At this point in the presidential race, we're all familiar with the simplistic one-liners that Trump often spouts while he's giving speeches or talking with TV reporters. In public speaking, he tends to be as broad and non-specific as possible when explaining the finer points of his plans for improving America, so the often bigoted one-liners tend to receive the most attention. But what are Donald Trump's actual policies? What does he stand for? These questions are a lot harder to answer than you'd think, because Trump is constantly switching sides on so many of his supposedly central issues.
There are seven total issues presented on the Donald J. Trump For President website, as opposed to the 31 issues shown on Hillary's campaign website and the 34 issues on Bernie's campaign website. While more issues doesn't automatically make you a more savvy political candidate, it's clear that Hillary and Bernie are using their platforms to fit as many eggs as possible into one basket. They are attempting to address more American issues than Trump, at least officially. Unofficially, Trump has spoken on more than seven issues. But the fact remains that Trump's official platform looks increasingly limited when compared to the other presidential hopefuls.
So, what are these seven issues that Trump's campaign website lists? The very first one, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the issue of how to coerce Mexico into paying for the infamous wall. It's not even a plan for building the wall itself, the website focuses solely on how to manipulate our neighbor country into paying us for constructing the thing. This problem of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall is followed on the website by the issues of healthcare reform, U.S.-China trade reform, reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs, tax reform, the Second Amendment and immigration reform.
As we know, Trump's positions and opinions are not confined to these seven issues--they are simply the ones his campaign has branded as the most important to him and his platform. Trump has expressed his stance on many other topics, such as abortion, waterboarding terrorists, his method for dealing with ISIS, visas for high-skilled workers, the refugee crisis in Syria, the Ku Klux Klan, the Iran Nuclear Deal and of course, his proposal for banning Muslims from the United States.
Trump's views on several, if not all, of these issues have either changed completely or switched so rapidly and in such short periods of time that it can be difficult to follow what Trump actually supports and what he does not. For the purpose of this article, we'll focus on his opinions about some of the more high-profile issues.
On the subject of abortion, Trump has made it clear that he feels some sort of "punishment" should occur for the women that receives one, if she were to do it while a ban on abortion were in place. Eighty minutes following the interview where that statement took place, Trump released a statement saying that "the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb." His revolving stance on this issue is made even less clear when we look back on this 1999 interview, where Trump describes himself as completely pro-choice and insists that he would not ban abortion.
Trump's proposed Muslim ban has received more attention than arguably any other part of his campaign. But is he even serious about what he's suggesting? After first saying that, "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," was necessary for the country, he later changed his stance in a way that shows clear bias and self-interest. In a later interview on Fox News, Trump explained that Muslims currently serving in the U.S. military would be safe from persecution, as well as some American Muslims that are already residents, including his alleged "many Muslim friends."
Finally, Trump's stance on Syrian refugees has been the most indecisive of the bunch. He's switched from insisting that the United States has no other choice but to take in refugees from Syria, in a Fox News interview last September, to insisting that the United States can't take in refugees at all. This change of mind occurred in the span of a single day, as he released the latter statement one day after his Fox News interview on the subject.
