By: BBC
Republican Donald Trump has won victory in the presidential race. What are his policies and beliefs?
1. The US should use waterboarding and other methods of “strong interrogation” in its fight against the Islamic State group. Trump said that these methods are “peanuts” compared to the tactics used by the militants, such as beheadings. “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough,” he said in June of the practice banned by the US in 2006.
2. Mexico should pay for the “great, great wall”.Mr Trump has said he wants to start building a wall on the shared border from the first day of his presidency. In some of his earliest campaign comments, he suggested that Mexicans coming to the US were criminals and “rapists”. A wall on the border, he claims, will not only keep out undocumented immigrants but Syrian migrants as well. BBC analysis estimates the wall could cost between $2.2bn and $13bn.
3. There should be surveillance on US mosques. Mr Trump believes Muslims should be tracked by law enforcement as a counterterrorism initiative. He has backed off comments about keeping a database on all American Muslims, but says he doesn’t care if watching mosques is seen as “politically incorrect”.
4. Arab-Americans cheered the attacks on 9/11. Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that on 11 September 2001, there were thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating in New Jersey after two planes flew into the Twin Towers. He says such public demonstrations “tell you something” about Muslims living in the US. However, there are no media reports to back up the claim.
5. Climate change is just “weather”. While Mr Trump believes that maintaining “clean air” and “clean water” is important, he has dismissed climate change science as a “hoax” and believes environmental restrictions on businesses make them less competitive in the global marketplace. “I do not believe that we should imperil the companies within our country,” he told CNN on the issue. “It costs so much and nobody knows exactly if it’s going to work.”
6. Rating women by their looks. A video from 2005 showed Mr Trump making obscene comments about women and triggered numerous claims of alleged sexual harassment. At one rally, he suggested that one of the accusers – a “horrible woman” – was not attractive enough for him to have groped: “I don’t think so! I don’t think so!” People who worked on his reality TV show The Apprentice accused him of rating female contestants by their looks. A former Miss Universe accused him of calling her “Miss Piggy” after she gained weight.
7. 35 is “check-out time” for women. In audio recordings released by CNN, Trump allegedly talks about his daughter’s physique and dating young women, saying that women who are 30 years old are at a “perfect age”, and that when they reach 35, it is time to “check out”.
8. The US needs to “bomb the hell” out of IS. He has vowed to weaken the militants by cutting off their access to oil.
9. The world would be better off if Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were still in power. Mr Trump told CNN that he believes the situation in both Libya and Iraq is “far worse” than it ever was under the leaders of the two countries. While he concedes Saddam was a “horrible guy”, he says he did a better job combating terrorists. “He was a bad guy – really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.”
10. Illegal migrants should be deported. Trump once said that he wanted to deport all of the approximately 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the US, despite criticism that this idea is both xenophobic, next to impossible and prohibitively expensive – the BBC estimates a cost of $114bn. His official policy now says only those with criminal records will be deported immediately. Immigration controls will still be massively beefed up, including a tripling of agents. Anyone who enters illegally will be deported and anyone already in the US without papers would face the risk of deportation.
11. Muslims should not be admitted to the US. In a press release published in the wake of the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, Mr Trump wrote that he was “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. The release created a huge backlash, including a petition submitted to British Parliament demanding that Trump not be allowed into the country.
He’s since gone back on the announcement, instead saying that that he would temporarily suspend “immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism”.
12. Syrian refugees could be a “Trojan horse” to sneak terrorists into the US. He says that the Paris attacks prove that even a handful of terrorists posing as migrants could do catastrophic damage, and so he will oppose resettling any Syrians in the US, and deport those who have already been resettled. It’s unclear if he still believes that deportations are necessary, though he has still vowed to suspend the intake of Syrian refugees.
13. In order to end mass shootings, the US should invest in mental health treatment. However, Mr Trump does not believe that more gun control is the answer. In a position paper on gun rights, Mr Trump revealed he had a concealed-carry permit and that when it comes to gun and magazine bans, “the government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own”. He would also oppose an expansion of background checks.
14. Vladimir Putin is a “leader”. He has noted the Russian president’s “great control over his country” and criticised the state of the relations between it and the US. In an interview with CNN, Mr Trump said: “I would probably get along with him very well. And I don’t think you’d be having the kind of problems that you’re having right now”. More recently he has said that Mr Putin doesn’t “respect” the US, although that was no reason to get tough on him.
15. Taxes should be reduced for everyone. Mr Trump wants to condense the current seven tax brackets to just three, with no income tax for “low-income Americans”. He would lower the business tax to 15%, from 35%. He would also allow multinational companies keeping profits overseas to repatriate their cash at a 10% tax rate.
16. Hedge fund managers are “getting away with murder” under the current US tax code. Mr Trump found common ground with Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren when he said that hedge fund managers and the ultra-wealthy did not pay enough taxes. However, after the campaign released specifics of his plan, analysts argued that hedge fund managers would actually get a tax cut along with the middle class.
17. China should be taken to task on a number of issues in order to make trade with the US more equitable. He says he will make China stop undervaluing its currency, and force it to step up its environmental and labour standards. He is also critical of the county’s lax attitude towards American intellectual property and hacking.
18. Current unemployment statistics are wrong. Mr Trump has said repeatedly that unemployment in the US is at 20% – once commenting it may be as high as 42% – despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the number at 4.9%.
19. The Black Lives Matter movement is “trouble”. Mr Trump mocks former Democratic candidates like Martin O’Malley for apologising to members of the protest movement against police brutality and casts himself as a pro-law enforcement candidate. “I think they’re looking for trouble,” he once said of the activist group. He also tweeted a controversial graphic purporting to show that African Americans kill white and black people at far higher rates than white people or police officers. However, the graphic cites a fictitious “Crime Statistics Bureau” for its numbers, and has been widely debunked using real FBI data.
20. His net worth is $10bn. Based on Mr Trump’s 92-page personal financial disclosure form, Bloomberg calculated last year that the real estate mogul was worth about $2.9bn, while Forbes recently put Trump’s net worth at $3.7bn. Mr Trump has however insisted that he is worth “in excess” of $10bn. He says he self-funded his campaign and describes his start in the business world as a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father.
21. Veteran healthcare in the US needs a major overhaul. Mr Trump wants to clear out the executive level in the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying that waiting times for doctor visits have only increased after previous interventions failed. Thousands of veterans have died while waiting for care, he says. He will invest in the treatment of “invisible wounds” like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He would also increase the number of doctors who specialise in women’s health to help care for the increasing number of female veterans.
22. Obamacare is a “disaster”. Mr Trump says he favours repealing the president’s Affordable Care Act, which aims at extending the number of Americans with health insurance, but he believes that “everybody’s got to be covered”. A spokesman for Mr Trump told Forbes that he would propose “a health plan that will return authority to the states and operate under free market principles”.
23. Lobbyists should be more restricted. Mr Trump proposes that there be a five-year ban that prevents government officials and members of congress from leaving and then immediately becoming lobbyists. He also calls for a lifetime ban on senior administration officials from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments, and has called on Congress to change campaign finance laws to ban those people that lobby for foreign governments from raising funds for US elections.
24. He is a “really nice guy”. In Trump’s most recent book, Crippled America, he writes that “I’m a really nice guy, believe me, I pride myself on being a nice guy but I’m also passionate and determined to make our country great again”. The news site Gawker points out that he calls himself a “nice guy” throughout the book, and Mr Trump repeated that self-assessment in his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live and in an interview with the Washington Post.
25. Tokyo and Seoul should build up nuclear arsenals. He has said Japan and South Korea should not rely on the US so much and would benefit from having their own weapons. Nuclear war between Japan and North Korea may be “terrible” but it would be “pretty quick”.
26. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) is a “rip-off” because the US pays more than anyone else. But he later said he was “all” for the alliance.
27. Doctors should be punished for administering abortions – or should they? In an interview with MSNBC, Mr Trump said that if abortion were to become illegal, women should be punished for obtaining them. He then retracted, saying the doctor would be responsible and he or she should be punished, instead.
28. The Republican National Committee’s rules were “stacked against him”.He called the delegate system “crooked” and “unfair”. He repeatedly clashed with the RNC over its nomination process and how it treated his candidacy during the primaries. He called rules that allowed Senator Ted Cruz to gain more delegates than him in some states “rigged”, as he did later when talking about the electoral process when polls were showing Hillary Clinton ahead of him.
29. The federal minimum wage should be raised from its present level of $7.25/hour, though he has flip-flopped on this issue.
30. Hillary Clinton tried to bribe Attorney-General Loretta Lynch with the promise of keeping her job if she became president, in return for Mrs Clinton escaping prosecution for the use of a private email server when secretary of state. He also said she destroyed the women who accused her husband Bill of impropriety. George Stephanopoulos, a former aide to Bill Clinton, wrote in his memoir that in 1991 when a woman came forward to accuse Mr Clinton of having an affair, Mrs Clinton said: “We have to destroy her story.”
