Tag: advisors
Surprise: Trump Team Has No Idea On Policy Specifics

Surprise: Trump Team Has No Idea On Policy Specifics

By Emily Stephenson and Steve Holland

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – People seeking a deeper understanding of Donald Trump’s economic policy came up empty-handed this week at the Republican National Convention.

Best known to Americans previously as a reality TV host and having never held public office, the New York businessman on Thursday accepted the party’s nomination for the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

The party establishment has fretted over some of his plans to curb illegal immigration, renegotiate trade deals and levy tariffs on China. Trump’s skepticism about free trade puts him at odds with Republican orthodoxy. Wall Street investors are wary and confused.

In speeches from the main stage and in panel discussions on the sidelines, the four-day convention was notable for a paucity of policy details, the result perhaps of a desire to play down differences among the party faithful.

The lack of specifics was too much for one head of a multinational corporation, who complained at a business forum that he had no idea what to expect from Trump, a New York real estate developer.

“We feel anxious,” said Michael Thaman, chief executive officer of Owens Corning, which operates in 25 countries. “In business, obviously details matter.”

Trump offered little insight himself in his convention-ending acceptance speech. He spoke in broad, thematic strokes without much detail, sticking closely to positions he had outlined during 13 months of campaigning.

“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” Trump said.

HILLARY CLINTON THE TOP TOPIC

Speakers in Cleveland placed a greater emphasis on defeating the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, than on what Trump has called the failed economic policies of President Barack Obama.

On Tuesday night, when the theme was “Make America Work Again” and the economy was the designated topic, a rough search by Reuters of the prime-time speeches found some 80 mentions of the word “Clinton” compared to about 15 mentions of “economy.”

According to transcripts of the speeches delivered at the convention, only Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. mentioned Dodd-Frank, the financial oversight law many Republicans rail against.

Asked on Thursday, before the older Trump’s speech, about the shortage of policy specifics, his campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said: “The campaign is pleased with the convention program, the content of which has been diverse and dynamic and we look forward to an exciting conclusion tonight.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was chief economic policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008, was not satisfied with his experience.

He described taking part in a panel discussion on Wednesday with two Trump advisers, television commentator Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore of the conservative Heritage Foundation, that he said was light on details.

“’Isn’t Mr. Trump bad on trade?’” he said someone would ask.

“’Yes, but we’re going to fix it. Don’t worry.’

“‘Isn’t his tax plan a problem that’s going to lose $12 trillion?’

“‘Yes, but we’ll fix it. Don’t worry.'”

Kudlow and Moore also appeared on Tuesday at an event hosted by conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks, along with donor Andy Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which owns fast-food restaurants Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

The group discussed trade and immigration policy, with panelists at times shrugging off Trump’s lack of specifics. “All you really need to know is the alternative is Hillary Clinton,” Puzder said at one point, reinforcing the week’s theme.

UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION

Republicans typically use their nominating conventions to emphasize their candidates’ main policy points. Think tanks and lobby groups hold panel discussions. Experts circulate white papers.

With Trump, the events were built more around his personality and the need for the party to unite behind him. There were some such gatherings in Cleveland, but fewer than usual, Holtz-Eakin said.

Some advisers to past Republican candidates suspected Trump was not relying on a vast team of policy advisers.

Lanhee Chen, an adviser to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, sorted through convention speeches in 2012 before speakers delivered them because, he said, he wanted to make sure they hewed closely to Romney’s positions.

“I imagine the Trump campaign doesn’t have that process in place because they don’t have a lot of policy to talk about,” Chen said. “It just says that policy hasn’t been a priority for them. You end up with a situation where the candidate is making pronouncements that don’t seem particularly well informed.”

Some delegates who spoke to Reuters seemed unconcerned by the policy-light approach to the convention, arguing that it was more important for the gathering to whip up enthusiasm among the delegates and forge unity.

“This is more of a party,” said Ray Suttle, a 53-year-old lawyer and delegate from Virginia. “You don’t like people talking shop at a cocktail party, do you?”

 

(Additional reporting by James Oliphant; Writing by Howard Goller; Editing by Ross Colvin)

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump supporters carry a banner at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 21, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Trump Taps Climate Change Skeptic As Energy Adviser, Pushes Back On Taxes

Trump Taps Climate Change Skeptic As Energy Adviser, Pushes Back On Taxes

Donald Trump on Friday pushed back against renewed calls that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee release his income tax returns before the election, and picked a prominent climate change skeptic to help him formulate his energy policy.

American presidential candidates have voluntarily released their tax returns for decades. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have both released their returns.

Trump, who has all but locked up the Republican Party’s nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election, has said the Internal Revenue Service was auditing his returns and he wanted to wait until the review was over before making them public.

“It should be, and I hope it’s before the election,” Trump told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Trump is building out his policy proposals as he pivots from campaigning for his party’s nomination to the general election, including tapping experts in various fields.

Among those he has asked for help is U.S. Republican Representative Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, one of the country’s most ardent oil and gas drilling advocates and climate change skeptics.

North Dakota has been at the forefront of the U.S. shale oil and gas boom. Cramer endorsed Trump earlier this year.

Trump has asked Cramer to write a white paper, or detailed report, on energy policy, according to Cramer and sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Cramer was also among a group of Trump advisers who recently met with lawmakers from Western energy states, who hope Trump will open more federal land for drilling, a lawmaker who took part in the meeting said.

Cramer said in an interview that his paper would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, burdensome taxes, and over-regulation. Trump will have an opportunity to float some of the ideas at an energy summit in Bismarck, North Dakota on May 26, Cramer said.

A spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign did not comment.

Environmental groups gave Trump’s pick negative reviews.

“Kevin Cramer has consistently backed reckless and dangerous schemes to put the profits of fossil fuel executives before the health of the public, so he and Trump are a match made in polluter heaven,” Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce said in an emailed statement.

Cramer also came in for criticism from NextGen Climate, a lobbying group.

Trump has been light on details of his energy policy so far, though he recently told supporters in West Virginia that the coal industry would thrive if he were president. He has also claimed global warming is a concept “created by and for the Chinese” to hurt U.S. business.

Clinton has advocated shifting the country to 50 percent clean energy by 2030, promised heavy regulation of fracking, and said her prospective administration would put coal companies “out of business.”

But the ins and outs of campaigning continue to be a major topic with Trump, who has never held elected office.

On Friday, the billionaire real estate developer, who has often boasted of his wealth, was asked why he had been willing in the past to release his tax information to Pennsylvania and New Jersey officials when seeking casino licenses, even though he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

“At the time it didn’t make any difference to me. Now it does,” Trump said.

Pressed on what tax rate he pays, Trump refused to say. “It’s none of your business,” he said.

“Before 1976, people didn’t do it,” he added. “It used to be a secret thing.” Trump has said there is nothing voters can learn from his tax filings.

The IRS declined to comment on whether he or any other presidential candidates were being audited.

However, the Trump campaign earlier this year released a letter from his attorneys saying his personal tax returns have been under “continuous examination” from the IRS.

This week, Clinton began calling on her probable Republican rival to release his returns, as she has. Last August, the former U.S. secretary of state posted the past eight years of tax returns for her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, on her website. Sanders released his 2014 return in April.

Presidential candidates have a long history in the modern era of releasing their tax returns.

“In 1976, Gerald Ford did not release his returns, but he did release some information about his taxes,” said Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that provides tax news and analysis.

“That was the last time that a major party nominee hasn’t done it,” he said.

Tax filings show sources of income, both from within the United States and other countries, as well as charitable giving, investments, deductions and other financial information.

 

Reporting by Megan Cassella and Susan Heavey; Writing by Luciana Lopez; Editing by Frances Kerry and Jonathan Oatis

Photo: An anti-Trump mask and sign sit outside Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, May 12, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

Cruz And Trump’s Foreign Policy Advisors Are Unsurprisingly Bad

Cruz And Trump’s Foreign Policy Advisors Are Unsurprisingly Bad

Stories about campaign policy advisors are normally ones of process, interesting only to those inside the beltway. This is truly the nitty-gritty of political analysis: delving into the resumes of the men and women behind the candidate, and trying to extrapolate broad worldviews or specific policy recommendations they might be whispering into candidates’ ears. In short, it’s normally pretty banal stuff to the average observer.

It says something about the GOP race for president, then, that the foreign policy teams of their presumptive nominee and current runner-up are making such a splash in the news cycle.

Last week, the Republican Party’s last unpleasant hope to stop presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, released an eclectic mix of foreign policy advisors. One the one hand, Cruz has poached traditional neoconservatives, including names like Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra indictment fame or Michael Leeden, Iraq and Iran war advocate extraordinaire. Yet on the other, he has courted some of the most extreme single-issue Islamophobes on the fringe of the right. Chief among these is of course Frank Gaffney, whose insane brand of Islamophobia includes believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing and warning against the infiltration of the American government (including the Republican Party) by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The curious range of folks on his team mirrors Cruz’s obfuscatory foreign policy stances. Cruz has branded himself against neoconservatives, frequently lumping primary opponent Sen. Marco Rubio in with the Obama-Clinton (read: NATO) intervention in Libya. Nonetheless, they now appear on the senator’s foreign policy team, perhaps drawn to his idle promises of “carpet bombing” ISIS. But Cruz is trying to have his cake and eat it too; while on the one hand seeking the endorsement of the Washington establishment he so loathes (and that so loathes him) via the neoconservatives, he’s also trying to hit Trump from the right flank by bringing in extremist charlatans like Gaffney.

Meanwhile, 181 days after promising radio host Hugh Hewitt he’d be announcing “something very soon” and that “so many great national security people, including generals” were clamoring to be by his side, Trump has released the names of five advisors. There is arguably little point in analyzing the individual members of Trump’s national security team, because they are not a means to an end (better policy) but an end in and of themselves: Red meat for the beltway press to devour, and a throwaway line (“See, he has advisors—and they aren’t political hacks, either!”) for his supporters to holler at anyone who will listen.

In the same editorial board meeting in which Trump unveiled this preliminary list of advisors, he also suggested that the United States should step back from NATO, of all things. Trump’s understanding of U.S. power projection around the world as a money drain—and his proposed solution of a tribute payment solution—reflects a childish understanding of geopolitics, but he’s been expressing it consistently and publicly since 1990. Advisors will not change that view, but instead adapt their own expertise to bolster it in some way. At the end of the day, Trump’s comment that his best foreign policy advisor is himself because he has “a very good brain and [has] said a lot of things” is all the statement that one needs to understand how he views the world.

Both candidates’ foreign policy teams, thus, say more about their character than their substance. For Cruz, it’s a flexible attempt to reconcile his current need for the establishment with his past brand of radicalism; for Trump, it’s a cultivation of low-level sycophants who will validate his own assumptions about the world until the establishment swallows its pride and comes around to do the same. Meanwhile, the troubling spaces where both men overlap on foreign policy—inhumane positions on torture and refugees, simplistic, bomb-based plans to defeat ISIL, and reckless preference for force over diplomacy—remain too little discussed and dissected.

Banking on lists of advisors to adjust rhyme, reason, or American values into the GOP foreign policy conversation is clearly a faint hope.

Graham F. West manages The Whistlestop (@thewhistle_stop), a platform for holding candidates and elected officials accountable on issues of national security and foreign policy throughout the 2016 cycle. Views expressed are his own.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate businessman Donald Trump and rival candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R) cross paths during a break at the Fox Business Network Republican presidential candidates debate in North Charleston, South Carolina January 14, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane 

Obama Approves Sending 1,500 More Troops To Iraq

Obama Approves Sending 1,500 More Troops To Iraq

Washington (AFP) – President Barack Obama has approved sending up to 1,500 additional troops to Iraq to aid Baghdad government and Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State group, roughly doubling the number of U.S. troops in the country, the White House said Friday.

The 1,500 troops will include a group of advisors to help Iraqi forces plan operations and a group of trainers who will be deployed across the country, officials said, as Washington steps up the pressure on the IS militants.

Some of the advisors will be deployed to western Anbar province, where the Iraqi army has been forced to retreat from advancing IS jihadists, a defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity told AFP.

Some of the additional troops will begin to arrive in Iraq in the next several weeks, the official said.

“As a part of our strategy for strengthening partners on the ground, President Obama today authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 additional U.S. military personnel in a non-combat role to train, advise, and assist Iraqi security forces, including Kurdish forces,” a statement said.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recommended the move to Obama based on a request from the Iraqi government and the assessment of U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the air war against the IS militants, the Pentagon said.

The deployment coincides “with the development of a coalition campaign plan to defend key areas and go on the offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” it said, referring to IS fighters who have grabbed large areas of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The training will focus on 12 Iraqi brigades — nine Iraqi army and three Peshmerga brigades, the Pentagon said.

The training sites will be located in northern, western, and southern Iraq and “coalition partners will join U.S. personnel at these locations to help build Iraqi capacity and capability,” it added.

AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye