“It’s just puzzling,” said Lanhee Chen, who has served as a policy adviser to several Republican presidential candidates. “This is the issue on which he rose to prominence in the primary and the issue on which he continues to stake much of his campaign.”
From the start, Trump has never been the kind of candidate to pore over thick policy books.
Indeed, he has mocked Clinton on the subject.
“She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day. Nothing’s ever going to happen. It’s just a waste of paper,” he told Time Magazine in June. “My voters don’t care and the public doesn’t care. They know you’re going to do a good job once you’re there.”
To date, Trump’s campaign has posted just seven policy proposals on his website, totaling just over 9,000 words. There are 38 on Clinton’s “issues” page, ranging from efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease to Wall Street and criminal justice reform, and her campaign boasts that it has now released 65 policy fact sheets, totaling 112,735 words.
“I’ve laid out the best I could, the specific plans and ideas that I want to pursue as your president because I have this old-fashioned idea,” Clinton said during a recent speech in Colorado. “When you run for president, you ought to tell people what you want to do as their president.”
Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has said she’s pushing her boss to get more specific. Yet his positions on a host of issues remain vague at best.
For example, while Trump has slammed the Common Core education standards and touts the benefits of local control of education, he has no formal, detailed plans for improving public schools. He talks about student loan debt and the increasing costs of higher education, but has yet to propose solutions. He has teased plans to make childcare more affordable, but has missed his own deadline for unveiling them.
Trump’s supporters say questions about his recent waffling on the deportation question are overblown. His running mate, Mike Pence, describes him as “a CEO at work” as he consults with various stakeholders.
“You see someone who is engaging the American people, listening to the American people,” Pence told CNN on Sunday. “He is hearing from all sides.”
But Chen, the Republican policy adviser, said a President Trump arriving at the White House without detailed plans could be limited in how much he might achieve, since a new president’s power is at its apex early on.
“If you’re not able to hit the ground running, chances are you’re going to run into serious resistance if you sit there studying something for the first 100 days,” he said.
