Questioning
Donald Trump
By THE EDITORIAL
BOARD
NOV. 22, 2016
NOV. 22, 2016
It was good to hear
Donald Trump “disavow and condemn” the white nationalism of some
of his supporters, in a meeting Tuesday at The New York Times.
It was good to hear
him acknowledge that climate change is linked to human activity, and
that maybe waterboarding isn’t such a great idea after all. And
speaking for the home team, it was good to hear him even call The New
York Times a “great, great American jewel.”
It was, of course,
hard to square all these statements with his record of spreading the
birther lie about President Obama, calling climate change a “hoax,”
promising he’d “bring back waterboarding” and describing The
New York Times as “failing.”
But, hey, if
President-elect Trump moderates his views, and then crystallizes
those views in policies that, as he put it, “save our country,”
we will commend him on growth in office. “I am awed by the job,”
he said.
The problem is, as
pleasant as it was to hear those remarks, it was alarming to confront
how thinly thought through many of the president-elect’s stances
actually are. Consider climate change. Mr. Trump said that he valued
clean air and water, but that he hadn’t decided if combating
climate change was worth the expense. “I have a totally open mind,”
he said, making a virtue of not knowing the issue.
Or take torture. In
the campaign, he stoutly defended waterboarding, which is contrary to
American values and illegal under international law. Yet one
conversation, with Gen. James Mattis, a candidate for defense
secretary, may have changed his mind. General Mattis told Mr. Trump
what experts have been saying for years: Torture doesn’t work. Mr.
Trump said he was “impressed and surprised” by General Mattis’s
assurance that, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers
and I’ll do better.”
We would applaud any
sensible change of position, however arrived at. Mr. Trump’s
apparent flexibility, combined with his lack of depth on policy,
might be grounds to hope he will steer a wiser course than the one
plotted by his campaign. But so far he is surrounding himself with
officials eager to enact only the most extreme positions. His
flexibility would be their springboard.
President Obama, who
also spoke of bringing the country together, invited Republicans to
join his administration. We have not yet seen Mr. Trump make any such
effort to reach across party lines.
And in one area, Mr.
Trump remained quite inflexible: He made clear he has no intention of
selling his businesses and stepping decisively away from corrupting
his presidency with an exponentially enhanced version of the
self-dealing he accused Hillary Clinton of engaging in.
Ronald Reagan used
to say that in dealing
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