What Trump says he’ll do
This exhausting election campaign has been dominated by verbal eruption after verbal eruption by Donald Trump, and revelation after revelation about his past. Those have been clarifying and important, for they have laid bare that the man — pathologically dishonest, egotistical, vindictive, ignorant, misogynistic, divisive — is temperamentally unfit to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.
But the cycles of outburst and outrage have had an unfortunate side effect: obscuring the dangerous proposals Trump has put forward, which would be uniquely disqualifying even if the man had the character of Abraham Lincoln.
Trump, having never before held public office, cannot be judged not on any record of civic accomplishment, but only on what he has promised over the last 16 months to do.
Between now and Election Day, leaving Trump the Man to one side, we take a cold look at Trump the Candidate’s ideas for America.
The cornerstone of his campaign, the set of policies that more than any other served as an accelerant for his rise through a crowded Republican field, is immigration, and specifically his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border and swiftly deport 11 million undocumented people.
The Berlin Wall spanned 96 miles; Trump’s “big and beautiful” wall would have to stretch 2,000, costing at least $25 billion — and forcing the largest use of eminent domain in American history, bar none. Maintenance alone would cost approximately $750 million annually.
Trump says those costs will be covered by the Mexican government, but our southern neighbor laughs at the notion. American taxpayers will be on the hook for every cent.
Even were the wall affordable, the havoc it would wreak is unthinkable: More than 20% of all U.S. jobs are tied to trade along the border.
Mass deportation plans are more ominous still. Two-thirds of Americans support a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants; Trump ignores that consensus, calling instead for creating a “deportation force” that would put the federal government at war with its cities and states.
The vast majority of the 11 million undocumented people living in America are contributing members of society who work and pay taxes. Many are mothers and fathers of 5 million nativeborn American citizens.
Trump would either break apart those families, child from parent, or yank thousands upon thousands of American citizen children out of U.S. schools, and spirit them out of the country, because of their heritage.
If the moral cost weren’t awful enough, consider the government outlays: an estimated $140 billion, according to independent experts. A conservative think tank estimates Trump’s immigration plans would reduce real gross domestic product by $1 trillion in just two years.
Perhaps Trump’s most incendiary immigration promise, since half-abandoned, is to impose a “total and complete shutdown” of all Muslims — 23% of the planet’s population — entering the United States, either as students, workers or visitors.
That would play into the hands of radical Islamist terrorists, marking America as fundamentally hostile to even moderate and secular Muslims.
Trump has since suggested instead imposing utterly unworkable “extreme vetting” that would subject newcomers to a values-based loyalty test — one that would, if consistently applied, ban all types of people based on their beliefs.
Taken together, the policies would render America, a tolerant nation of immigrants, almost unrecognizable.
Watch this space for the next six days.