As President Trump faces criticism for flip-flopping on a number of issues, the White House has pointed to his focus on results to explain why the president has not always taken the same positions he did as a candidate.
From abandoning a pledge to confront China economically to voicing tentative support for a Federal Reserve chair he previously criticized, Trump’s policy changes this week likely exacerbated fears among his populist supporters that the “America First” agenda is vulnerable in an ideologically divided White House.
“I think the president’s tough talk was on a variety of subjects, was to gets results for the American people. That’s what he has pledged to do, to get more jobs here, to grow more manufacturing, to keep our country safe,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday in response to questions about why Trump’s “tough talk” on China, like in other areas, had given way to more nuanced positions.
“At the end of the day, this is always about developing a better situation for the American people, and I think he’s done that,” Spicer said.
His argument — that Trump’s broader goals of creating jobs and strengthening national security would drive policy decisions more than ideology, convention or political expedience — did not extend to every presidential about-face. For example, when pressed Thursday on what persuaded Trump to decide he wanted to preserve funding for the Export-Import Bank, Spicer declined to answer in depth and said he would look into the “very complex issue” before returning to that reporter with a response.
Here are 11 issues on which Trump has softened or flipped altogether.
1. Enhanced interrogation
Trump had criticized the Obama administration for banning the practice of enhanced interrogation, arguing the move away from such tactics demonstrated his predecessor’s weakness on terrorism.
“The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind,” Trump argued in February of last year.
But Trump changed course in November after discussing torture with Gen. James Mattis, whom he would eventually name as his defense secretary.
Mattis explained to Trump that he had never found enhanced interrogation useful in practice, and the conversation seemingly shifted Trump’s thinking.
While the president said he didn’t “necessarily agree” with Mattis about torture, Trump announced in January that he would defer to his defense secretary on whether the armed forces could use it.
2. Obama-era executive ‘amnesties’
While Trump promised during the campaign that he would “immediately terminate” President Barack Obama’s two controversial executive orders on immigration, he has since indicated that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which protects so-called “dreamers” from deportation, will remain intact.
“This is a very, very difficult for me, one of the most difficult subjects,” Trump has said of DACA since taking office.
It is unclear what, if anything, the administration plans to do with a program conservatives once decried as unconstitutional. But it is clear Trump lacked the political will to strip protections from children of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents, at least not on the timeline he laid out during the campaign.
3. Special prosecutor for Clinton
The chants of “Lock her up!” that came to characterize Trump’s rallies by the end of his campaign stemmed from the candidate’s assertion that Justice Department officials had conspired with law enforcement agents to spare Hillary Clinton from punishment for her mishandling of classified information on a private server.
Trump promised at the time to appoint a special prosecutor who could see to it that Clinton potentially ended up behind bars.
The president quickly backed away from that threat upon winning the election, arguing he wanted to focus on his forward-looking agenda and avoid a distraction that could further divide the country.
4. Janet Yellen
Trump had accused Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen of creating a “false economy” by holding down interest rates during the campaign, for which he argued in the fall of last year that “she should be ashamed of herself.”
But Trump said Wednesday in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he would consider keeping her at the helm of the Fed by re-nominating her to that position.
“I like her, I respect her,” Trump said.
5. NATO
Trump had disparaged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as “obsolete,” arguing on the campaign trail that the alliance no longer fulfilled its intended purpose because member states were consistently failing to meet their obligation to direct 2 percent of their respective GDPs toward their militaries.
“I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete,” Trump said Wednesday during a joint appearance at the White House with the NATO secretary general.
Trump cited recent changes to NATO’s behavior — including what he described as its increased commitment to fighting terrorism — as the basis for his reversal.
6. Chinese currency manipulation
Although Trump’s promise to pursue more aggressive and favorable economic terms with China was a key element of his campaign, the president said this week that he did not see evidence of currency manipulation from the Chinese.
His comment came after more than a year of pledging to label China a currency manipulator immediately upon taking office.
The White House has since argued that Trump decided to soften his trade-related demands in exchange for increased cooperation on North Korea, which the administration has described as a top national security threat.
7. Export-Import Ban
Trump’s opposition to the Export-Import Bank, a government-backed institution that finances foreign investment deals that could facilitate U.S. exports, had become uncertain as early as February when Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said publicly that Trump had privately expressed a willingness to revive the agency.
But Trump made his support for Ex-Im explicit this week when he and his budget director signaled that the agency could soon be restored from its present state of de facto deactivation thanks to empty seats on its board.
It was a fundamental shift away from the criticism Trump heaped on Ex-Im during the campaign. In an Aug. 2015 interview with Bloomberg, Trump ripped the agency as “unnecessary.”
“I don’t like it because I don’t think it’s necessary,” Trump had said. “It’s a one-way street also. It’s sort of a featherbedding for politicians and others, and a few companies. And these are companies that can do very well without it. So I don’t like it. I think it’s a lot of excess baggage. I think it’s unnecessary. And when you think about free enterprise it’s really not free enterprise. I’d be against it.”
8. Improving ties to Russia
Trump’s push to stabilize U.S.-Russian relations was a routine policy on its face that sparked outrage from Democrats in the context of election-related cyberattacks executed by Russians last year. Clinton called Trump a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin during a debate, and Democrats accused Trump of harboring inappropriately affectionate sentiments toward Putin.
Given unsubstantiated allegations that Trump’s campaign associates colluded with the Russians to hack Democratic inboxes during the campaign, Trump had avoided putting his version of a Russian reset into action in the early weeks of his presidency.
But after the Assad regime in Syria — a staunch Russian ally — launched a chemical attack on its own people, the Trump administration responded with a missile strike against the Syrian government and a condemnation of Russian complicity in the attack.
Trump said this week that relations with Russia “may be at an all-time low,” and his Cabinet members have signaled the administration has no intention of backing down, rhetorically or strategically, from its aggressive posture toward Moscow.
9. Humanitarian intervention
Trump had criticized leaders from both parties for their support of intervention in foreign conflicts when there is no clear and direct U.S. interest at stake. He promised not to allow America to get dragged into protracted wars, and specifically opposed involvement in the Syrian civil war in a series of tweets that resurfaced this week in light of his strike on the Syrian government.
Although Trump insisted the U.S. would not invade Syria for the purposes of removing President Bashar Assad, his missile strike on an airfield controlled by the Assad regime was interpreted by many as a deviation from his stated opposition to military involvement in cases with a tenuous link to U.S. interests.
What’s more, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said this week that the U.S. would intervene to help “any and all” innocent civilians who suffered violence around the world, another departure from Trump’s more isolationist foreign policy proposals.
10. Taxes
The White House has pushed back on reports that aides scrapped the tax plan Trump put forward during his campaign in order to create an entirely new tax reform policy ahead of a self-imposed deadline in August.
However, the administration has already hinted it will most likely miss that deadline because it’s in the process of putting something new together, and it has already publicly softened a key aspect of the campaign-era plan.
Trump had promised to bring the corporate tax rate down from 35 percent to 15 percent — a major cut. Just three days into his presidency, he began admitting that the eventual cut would put the corporate tax rate “anywhere from 15 to 20 percent.”
A separate House Republican plan suggests lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent.
11. Lobbying ban
Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” seemingly manifested itself in a lobbying ban the president said he imposed on his team during the transition.
The arrangement was supposed to prevent administration officials from lobbying for domestic entities for five years upon their departure from the White House and forever restrict their ability to lobby for foreign entities.
But in two high-profile instances, the lobbying ban requirement has not stopped former officials from being able to find work as a lobbyist after leaving the West Wing.
Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, was somehow able to avoid signing the lobbying ban before his brief tenure at the White House.
And Marcus Peacock, a former White House budget adviser, secured a waiver to relieve him of his lobbying restrictions when he left the Office of Management and Budget this week to take a position at a business lobbying group, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
