11
questions for President-elect Donald Trump
What
the world wants to know.
By BLAKE
HOUNSHELL 11/10/16, 5:35 AM CET
From his calls to
jail his opponent to his conflicting statements about barring Muslims
from the United States, America’s next president has provoked a
striking number of questions about how he would govern. Here is an
early — and surely incomplete — list of some of the biggest:
1. Will he seek to
prosecute Hillary Clinton?
Trump has egged on
his supporters’ chants of “Lock her up,” predicted that Clinton
would be “in jail” if he were president and promised to appoint a
special prosecutor to “investigate Hillary Clinton’s crimes.”
Tuesday night’s victory speech was conciliatory — “we owe her a
major debt of gratitude for her service to our country,” Trump said
— but on Wednesday, his campaign manager passed up an opportunity
to disavow the idea, saying only, “We haven’t discussed that in
recent days, and I think that it’s all in due time.” For its
part, the White House declined to say whether President Barack Obama
might issue a pre-emptive pardon, just in case.
2. Will he divest
from his businesses?
Trump promised to
hand over his company to his children if he won, but there’s no
actual law that requires him to do so — presidents are exempt from
most of the conflict-of-interest rules that apply to Cabinet
officials. “If I become president, I couldn’t care less about my
company,” Trump said during one of the GOP primary debates. “It’s
peanuts.” But Trump has provided few details on how, if at all, he
plans to untangle himself from the Trump Organization and reassure
Americans that he won’t personally stand to benefit from his own
policies, or that, say, his foreign policy won’t influenced by his
vast web of business interests abroad.
3. Will he tear up
the Iran deal?
Trump took a softer
line on the U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran than his GOP primary
rivals, declining to say that he’d rip it up on Day One of his
presidency. Instead, he’d try to renegotiate its terms. But he’s
made his intentions clear, telling the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous
deal with Iran.”
Iran is clearly
nervous: The country’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, on Wednesday
urged America’s new president to stand by the agreement. Trump has
used an analogy from the real estate world to explain his approach:
“I’m really good at looking at a contract and finding things
within a contract that, even if they’re bad, I would police that
contract so tough that they don’t have a chance,” he said in
August.
4. Will he forgo a
salary?
Whether he’s truly
worth $10 billion or a few billion less, Donald Trump will be the
richest individual — by far — ever to occupy the Oval Office. In
September 2015, he said he “won’t take even one dollar” should
he be elected. ”I’m totally giving up my salary if I become
president,” Trump said during a video Q&A hosted by Twitter and
posted to his account. The president’s current salary is $400,000 a
year, but the job comes with a few perks — among them free lodging,
an expense account, a travel budget, a presidential retreat at Camp
David and the use of Air Force One.
5. Will he build the
wall, and how will he get Mexico to pay for it?
It’s hard to
imagine Trump reneging on the signature policy proposal of his
campaign: Building a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S. southern border,
and making Mexico pay for it. It’s just as hard to figure out how
he can possibly do it given not just the initial $5.1 billion price
tag, but also the difficulty of securing rights to the land and
providing for pricey ongoing maintenance — if he’s even able to
jam it through Congress. What’s more, Mexico has already loudly
shot down the idea that it will pay, and Trump has begun focusing on
the idea that by cracking down on remittances sent home by Mexican
immigrants, he’d bring America’s southern neighbor to the
bargaining table.
6. Will he try to
lift sanctions on Russia?
During a July 2016
interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump disputed the
notion that Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine, an
aggressive move that has made Russia an international outlaw. During
a news conference that same month, he said in response to a question
that he would be “looking at” whether to lift the sanctions
imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea. It’s not clear
how seriously he took the issue, however — “We’ll be looking at
that. Yeah, we’ll be looking,” was all he said. On Wednesday,
Russian media reported that Kremlin adviser Sergei Glazyev believes
that the U.S. will lift the sanctions under a President Trump.
Despite Trump’s warm embrace of Putin, he doesn’t have the power
to do it unilaterally, however — only Congress can undo the
sanctions.
7. Will he live in
the White House?
In many ways, moving
to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would be a step down for Trump. Although it
boasts six floors, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, White House is much
smaller than it looks, and it’s known as something of a gilded cage
for U.S. presidents — a suffocating bubble that makes it difficult
to interact with old friends and regular Americans. President Barack
Obama often chafed at the resulting claustrophobia, relishing long
dinners on trips abroad, spending weekend days at the golf course and
taking impromptu walks in the immediate vicinity of the White House.
Some have speculated
that Trump might set up a pied a terre at his new hotel in the Old
Post Office building just down the road. But he’s told interviewers
he would “live in the White House because it’s the appropriate
thing to do,” though doing so is not required by law. “I would
rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be
done,” he told The Hill in June 2015, working in a shot at Obama
for good measure: “I would not be a president who took vacations. I
would not be a president that takes time off.”
Would Trump
redecorate the presidential mansion in his own latter-day Rococo
style? He told People magazine last year that he would “maybe touch
it up a little bit. But the White House is a special place, you don’t
want to do much touching.”
8. Which people will
he keep out of the United States?
After last
December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump called
for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United
States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is
going on.” After weeks of heavy criticism, Trump eventually called
the idea “just a suggestion” and his campaign walked it back,
recasting the proposal as focused on people coming from countries
with serious terrorism problems. Though he never explicitly
repudiated the Muslim ban, Trump now uses the phrase “extreme
vetting” to describe his policy. In early October, his running mate
Mike Pence explained that the Muslim ban was “not Donald Trump’s
position now.” But the campaign has never clarified what, exactly,
that position is.
9. How many
undocumented immigrants will he deport?
Trump laid out his
immigration plans in a speech over the summer, promising to begin
shipping out what he estimated to be 2 million “criminal aliens”
on the first day of his presidency. But he left ambiguous how he
would deal with millions of others not accounted for in his plan —
a number some news outlets reckoned at 6.5 million or more.
10. Will he release
his tax returns as president?
By law, the
president’s tax returns get audited — but he doesn’t have to
release them. And given that Trump has said he won’t share the
documents until he is no longer under audit, he’s already given
himself an excuse never to do so. Presidents do have to file an
annual financial disclosure form, however — though if it’s
anything like the skimpy document Trump submitted during the GOP
primary, it is unlikely to reveal much.
11. Will he continue
to have access to his own Twitter account?
Trump’s aides
successfully wrestled away control of his volatile Twitter account in
the waning days of the campaign, preventing him from making any
statements that could damage his candidacy before Election Day -—like
his early-morning attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.
Trump’s tweets became an applause line for Clinton and Obama, who
said his 140-character bursts of invective proved him unfit for the
presidency. Even his own allies had urged him to knock it off, with
former House speaker Newt Gingrich commenting: “I don’t think you
want a president of the United States who randomly tweets. You want
somebody who thinks it through, has staff check it out. I mean — I
very much am opposed to this 3 a.m. baloney.”
Asked early in his
campaign by Fox News personality Sean Hannity whether he would tone
it down if he won the presidency, Trump said he would tweet “probably
a little bit less.” But, he said: “I do get my point across. You
know, it’s funny, for years, if somebody did bad stuff to me, I
couldn’t fight back. Now I have @realdonaldtrump, and I can tweet
some bad stuff about them. And if people like it, it’s all over the
world.”
Authors:
Blake Hounshell
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