Trump
some of his rivals have made specific tax proposals, Trump said he’ll unveil his in a couple of weeks.
Trump’s lack of specificity hasn’t hurt him so far as he has soared to the top of Republican polls. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone said Trump will eventually fill in more details.
“I think it’s necessary. That doesn’t mean you have to get down in the weeds with enormous detail, but I do think you have to give the broad strokes of your plan,” Stone said Thursday. “He’s a Wharton graduate. This is a very smart guy. He’s more than capable of it.”
Cracking down on illegal immigration has been Trump’s signature issue, and his campaign did release a six-page plan on it last month. Some of his rivals chipped away at the specifics during the CNN debate Wednesday in Simi Valley, Calif.
“For 15,000 people a day to be deported every day for two years is an undertaking that almost none of us could accomplish given the current levels of funding, and the current number of law enforcement officers,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump’s immigration platform would cost “hundreds of billions of dollars. It would destroy community life. It would tear families apart.”
On Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said: “You can’t just wave your hands and say the 14th Amendment is going to go away. It will take an extremely arduous vote in Congress, followed by two-thirds of the states, and if that doesn’t work to amend the Constitution, then it is a long, arduous process in court.”
Fiorina’s icy dismissal of Trump’s recent remark about her face was probably the debate’s most memorable moment. She was also cutting in response to Trump’s pledge to “get along with” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, offering a detailed contrast.
“Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him,” Fiorina said. “What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.”
Trump was criticized this month for his fumbling response to national security questions posed by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who was one of CNN’s questioners for Wednesday’s debate.
“Hugh was giving me name after name, Arab name, Arab name, and there are few people anywhere, anywhere that would have known those names. I think he was reading them off a sheet,” Trump said during the debate.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who this month called Trump’s performance on Hewitt’s show “very concerning,” declined to directly criticize Trump on the debate stage. But Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drew a vivid contrast to Trump by rattling off specific concerns about North Korea, China, Iran, Russia and Islamic terrorists.
“The next president of the United States better be someone that understands these issues and has good judgment about them because the number-one issue that a president will ever confront, and the most important obligation that the federal government has, is to keep this nation safe,” Rubio said.
Trump said he has been “meeting with people that are terrific people” for military and foreign policy advice.
“If I become president, we will do something really special. We will make this country greater than ever before. We’ll have more jobs. We’ll have more of everything,” Trump said in his closing remarks.
While he wasn’t as detailed as some of his rivals, Trump appealed to the anti-politician sentiment of many Republican voters.
“I don’t want to say ‘Politicians — all talk, no action.’ But a lot of what we talked about is words and it will be forgotten very quickly,” Trump said. “If I’m president, many of the things that we discussed tonight will not be forgotten. We’ll find solutions.”