A powerful force driving Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders in the presidential race is the frustration of grass-roots voters that politicians in Washington haven’t kept their promises.
Democrats,
though still high on President Obama, are upset about an economic
recovery that benefited Wall Street more than Main Street, top
executives more than workers.
The
anger is more palpable among Republican voters, who ushered in big
congressional majorities for the party, expecting to end Mr. Obama’s health care law, reduce the size of government, cut taxes and bolster national security. None of it happened.
With
that track record of broken promises and with Mr. Trump emerging as the
likely Republican presidential nominee, it’s good to look at his
prominent promises and the critiques:
National security:
Mr. Trump has pledged to be tough, to defeat the Islamic State by
bombing oil fields, which he would then turn over to American companies.
He would force Arabs to do the fighting against the Islamic State. He
says he will “get along very well”
with the Russian strongman Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Trump has
praised as a strong leader. He gets his foreign policy advice from
watching television news programs, he says.
This
doesn’t impress many foreign policy experts. “He has said very little
of substance,” said former Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana
Republican who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “It
appears he doesn’t have a real grasp of the range of complex issues or
hasn’t done his homework.”
Leon
E. Panetta, who served as defense secretary and director of the Central
Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, said, “It’s the sort
of stuff you expect to hear at the bar at the count
Mass deportations:
Mr. Trump proposes removing from the United States 11 million
undocumented immigrants within two years. He poses the challenge in
simple terms: “They say you have to go through a huge legal process. You
don’t. They are illegal.”
The
American Action Forum, a right-of-center research organization run by
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a prominent Republican economist, will soon release
a study on the economic impact of Mr. Trump’s plan: The number of
personnel devoted to apprehensions would soar to 90,582 from 4,844; the
number of attorneys and courts would increase twentyfold; the number of
detention beds would increase tenfold; and almost 100,000 chartered
buses and flights would be required. American Action estimates that the
cost to the economy would be $1 trillion.
The
Pew Research Center, which is nonpartisan, calculates that the
deportations would cause big job losses in sectors of the economy: 26
percent of farming, fishing and forestry workers; 17 percent of building
maintenance and cleaning personnel; and 14 percent of construction
workers. Studies showed that many of these jobs would go unfilled,
devastating the economy, says the Center for American Progress, a
liberal think tank.
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