“When you’re dealing, and that’s what I am, I’m a dealer,” he told my colleague Jeremy Peters last week, “you don’t go in with plans. You go in with a certain flexibility. And you sort of wheel and deal.”
Instead of promoting his ideological purity, he notes that policy choices are circumstance-specific. For example, he’s not a priori opposed to single-payer health care. “It works in Canada,” he said at the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 6. “It works incredibly well in Scotland.” Even in the United States, “it could have worked in a different age,” but it wouldn’t work very well right now, he said. So instead, he’d replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” which would take care of people who can’t afford health insurance.
Mr. Trump’s policy flexibility extends even to the core Republican issue of taxes. He has not proposed a tantalizingly low top income tax rate, like Rand Paul’s 14.5 percent or Ben Carson’s 10 percent. In fact, his vague tax position almost exactly copies Jeb Bush’s.
“You have to simplify this tax code,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday, “and from that point on you can maybe do something else, but before we do anything, simplify it, make it nice and easy for people to understand, and reduce taxes.” Compare this to what Mr. Bush said in May: “Simplifying the code, eliminating as many tax expenditures, tax deductions, tax credits as possible and lowering the rates has got to be a huge priority.”
The main way Mr. Trump stands out from the field on economic policy is leftward: While most Republicans favor free trade, Mr. Trump has called for much higher tariffs on imported goods to protect American industries from competition. He has also criticized his opponents for proposing cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “I’m gonna make us so rich you don’t have to do those things,” Mr. Trump said in April.
Mr. Trump’s moderation extends to social issues. He says he “absolutely” favors rape and incest exceptions to abortion bans, which Mr. Rubio and Scott Walker oppose. He attacked Mr. Bush for saying the government perhaps need not spend so much on women’s health.
And on foreign policy, Mr. Trump says he would “knock the hell out” of ISIS, but he also highlights his opposition since 2004 to the Iraq war, a year after it started.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/upsho ... lican.html
