Donald Trump policy positions: From immigration to foreign policy

Last week, the White House announced the outlines of a plan that would revamp the country’s legal immigration system, cutting back family-based immigration in favor of “merit-based” immigration. Under that system, the US would prioritize high-skilled immigrants with college degrees who speak English fluently over immigrants with immediate relatives in the US.

Trump and his advisers claim that such a system (which is similar to the one in Canada) is simply about merit — the idea that high-skilled immigrants contribute the most to society. But even if you ignore the racist undertones of that idea, the plan is flawed even based on pure economics.

The Social Security system is in trouble. It’s not just a future problem; America’s retirement insurance program is in trouble now. The federal government will start dipping into its Social Security savings account this year to help pay retirement benefits to millions of Americans.

In 2018, the federal government expects to receive about $2 billion less in payroll taxes and investment income than it will need to pay workers through the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program. If nothing changes, that savings account will run dry by 2034, right around when the last of the baby boomers reach retirement age. After that, the government will only have enough money to pay retirees and disabled workers 79 cents for every dollar they’re owed.

For the past few years, criminal justice policy has widely been considered an area ripe for reform from Democrats and Republicans. They want to make the system less punitive and pull back mass incarceration — a rare show of bipartisanship in an increasingly polarized political climate.

Then came Donald Trump.

Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump gave a speech that amounted to a full-throated denunciation of economic globalization and trade deals. Trade, according to Trump, is making America lose. To win, we need to embrace protectionism.

“Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization — moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas,” he said. “Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

After Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race, Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president. This is real, it’s happening, and it means Trump has a legitimate shot at becoming president.

That means it is time to start taking the possibility of a Trump presidency seriously — starting with his views on foreign affairs. As president, Trump would have near-total control over America’s policy toward other countries, in a way he wouldn’t with many domestic policy issues.

Donald Trump said during a town hall on NBC’s Today show Thursday that he would “absolutely” change the Republican platform to allow exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest, or saving the pregnant woman’s life.

”The Republican platform every four years has a provision that states that the right of the unborn child should not be infringed,” Today host Savannah Guthrie said. “And it makes no exceptions for rape, for incest, for the life of the mother. Would you want to change the Republican platform to include the exceptions that you have?”

Donald Trump’s immigration proposals have generally been imaginative, impractical, inhumane, and sometimes all three.

But the plan Trump released this week on how he’d get Mexico to pay for the wall along the southern border of the US hinged on something called remittances. Essentially the idea is to prevent Mexican immigrants in the US from sending money home to their families until the Mexican government agrees to pay for a border wall.

We did not really require further confirmation that Donald J. Trump doesn’t know much about foreign policy, but we got it this weekend, in the form of a lengthy interview by Maggie Haberman and David Sanger of the New York Times.

Despite not knowing much, Trump held forth for about 15,000 words’ worth of foreign policy talk, and somewhere in there managed to reveal, intentionally or not, some of how he thinks about the world and America’s role in it.

In September, Donald Trump sat down with Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes and told the world that he was a different kind of Republican.

“Everybody’s got to be covered,” he said, referring to his health care plan. “This is an un-Republican thing for me to say, because a lot of times they say, ‘No, no, the lower 25 percent that can’t afford private.’ But I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not.”

Donald Trump released a major policy proposal Wednesday night. It’s a seven-point plan to overhaul American health care — or, as Trump puts it, “healthcare reform to make America great again.”

In broad terms, Trump’s plan looks a lot like the dozen or so other Republican Obamacare repeal plans that have come out over the past few years. Trumpcare allows insurance companies to go back to refusing coverage for preexisting conditions, a key barrier to coverage before Obamacare’s coverage expansion.