Trump this week once again declined an opportunity to clarify his position on the Muslim ban, which he first proposed a year ago, suggesting that his position has been consistent. This left his aides a day later insisting once again that the year-old proposal for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration had evolved into something more nuanced.
The public back-and-forth reflects the degree to which Trump’s aides have struggled to reshape his initial pronouncement into something more palatable to the public than an all-out ban on a religion. And it highlights Trump’s propensity to double down on his original statements even as his advisers seek to shift the focus to other issues.
“As he’s walked through and learned about this stuff, he has evolved,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and a vice chairman of Trump’s transition committee. The policy has become “more targeted, more narrowly defined and more implementable,” he added.
In the past 12 months, Trump has veered widely on the issue. He has suggested that wealthy Muslims might be exempted from a ban and that country-specific enhanced vetting was an expansion, rather than a refinement, of his original proposal. At one point, Trump suggested the ban might affect only Muslims from “terror states.”
It has never been clear what Trump would classify as “terror states,” but he has alluded at times to Syria and Saudi Arabia.
The Full Story (December 22, 2016)
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