Traditionally, presidential elections force candidates to compare their actual records against what they’re saying on the campaign trail.
Governors running for president typically have to answer for how they’ve run their states. Members of Congress typically have to answer for their voting records. When there are gaps in a candidate’s actual voting or governing records, the focus turns to past statements.
But a different standard has been applied to Donald Trump. He has a very long history of making liberal statements, but whatever he’s said in the past gets swept under the rug in favor of what he happens to be saying at that very moment.
Trump, for instance, has a long history of supporting single-payer-style healthcare. In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, Trump described himself as a “liberal” on healthcare and suggested the U.S. should look to Canada’s socialist system as a “prototype.” During a Republican presidential debate, he said the socialist systems in Canada and Scotland worked well.
He told “60 Minutes” that he thinks government should pay for everybody’s healthcare. He has also adopted the liberal position of having government negotiate drug prices. During the campaign, he’s offered an incoherent mishmash of statements and half-baked healthcare policy proposals.
But Fox News’ Sean Hannity, a media booster of Trump’s candidacy, has taken to defending the candidate from charges that he supports government healthcare.
“I’ve interviewed him on healthcare, I’ve interviewed him many times and now for the past six interviews, he’s explained he wants portability, buying across state lines, healthcare savings accounts,” Hannity lamented after Trump’s victory in South Carolina.
In other words, as far as Hannity is concerned, whatever Trump is currently saying should be taken as his position, without regard for anything he’s had to say on the issue before seeking the Republican presidential nomination, or even at an earlier stage of the campaign.
Mitt Romney spent two presidential election cycles having to answer for positions he took going back to his 1994 U.S. Senate race with Ted Kennedy before he was accepted as the GOP nominee — as he should. But Trump has not received a similar level of scrutiny and conservative cheerleaders sit back as he changes his positions from day to day, or moment to moment.
There’s a reason why it’s important to focus on a candidate’s past stances. Candidates for office will say anything to get elected and to appeal to whatever audience they’re speaking with at the time. Examining past statements and records is a way of gauging whether the candidate was espousing the same ideas when their incentives were different. It’s a way of testing how genuine or committed a candidate is to a set of ideas.
In Trump’s case, past statements should take on an even more important role in evaluating his sincerity, because he has no voting record or governing record against which to judge him. He talks of winning great victories for conservative causes, and yet he can point to no example of a time when he fought to advance a conservative idea.
On the contrary, Trump has a long record of taking positions at odds with core conservative values. In 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice” to the point at which he said he wouldn’t support banning partial-birth abortion. In The America We Deserve, Trump actually chastised the Republican Party for not embracing stricter restrictions on gun rights. “The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions,” he wrote, and then went on to declare, “I support the ban on assault weapons.”
Trump’s conservative media cheerleaders do their followers a disservice by enabling his con game to continue and creating a troubling new standard in which candidates never have to say or do anything conservative before they run for office as a Republican.
