Trump: Won't mass-oust aliens

Sanders’ platform ideas gain

Donald Trump stops to talk with reporters Saturday as he rides the Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie, Scotland, near Aberdeen, with his granddaughter Kai.
Donald Trump stops to talk with reporters Saturday as he rides the Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie, Scotland, near Aberdeen, with his granddaughter Kai.

ABERDEEN, Scotland -- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Saturday that he wouldn't characterize his immigration policies as including "mass deportations" and that, rather than a blanket ban on Muslims entering the U.S., he'd focus on barring those from countries with links to terrorists.

Trump, in an interview at his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, also said he would toss out the work done over several years on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping trade pact, and start from scratch.

Democratic activists, meanwhile, pushed through a draft of their party's platform proposal. Allies of the presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, met in St. Louis for two days beginning Friday to work on the proposal.

Trump, a New York businessman, said his immigration policies would have "heart," suggesting he may be shifting tone to get into a general-election mode after the bruising primary season.

"President [Barack] Obama has mass-deported vast numbers of people -- the most ever, and it's never reported. I think people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody," Trump said.

Pressed on whether he would issue "mass deportations," Trump, 70, answered, "No, I would not call it mass deportations."

In Trump's immigration plan, released in 2015, the U.S. will build a wall along its border with Mexico and make Mexico pay for the structure by, in part, impounding certain remittance payments. Trump has also said he would deport all illegal aliens, a number estimated at 11 million.

"We are going to get rid of a lot of bad dudes who are here," he said at his golf course's clubhouse. "That I can tell you."

Earlier Saturday, Trump told reporters that he'd seek to restrict people from unspecified "terrorist countries" from entering the U.S. It marked a shift from a news release on Dec. 7 saying that, if elected, Trump wanted "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

There were an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world as of 2010, or about 23 percent of the world's population, according to the Pew Research Center.

Although the jihadi group Islamic State has occupied swaths of Iraq and Syria, Europe has also been rocked by terror attacks orchestrated by citizens of France and Belgium who were the sons of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The gunman in the Orlando, Fla., massacre this month was the New York-born son of immigrants from Afghanistan, and the perpetrator of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in December was a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, and his wife and fellow gunman was a Pakistani-born lawful resident.

Bilateral preference

On the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade agreement signed this year by 12 Pacific Rim countries, Trump said he would prefer bilateral talks.

"I like the idea of making deals with individual countries. They put in these vast number of countries, and it gets so complicated, and it's more than 6,000 pages," Trump said.

Trump hammered Obama for his work in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement seven years in the making. When asked if he would renegotiate the whole deal, Trump answered, "Yes."

"I think we should make deals with individual countries rather than large groups of countries. Otherwise, you're rewarding the countries that aren't as good as other countries," he added.

His comments contrasted with Obama's in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published last week. Obama suggested that Trump was resorting to "nativism and nostalgia and the sense that these are things that are now out of control."

"The majority of people, whether in the United States, in Europe, or certainly in rapidly advancing parts of the world like Asia -- those folks recognize that the world has shrunk, and that if the rules are structured properly, this gives them more opportunity, not less, to succeed," Obama said.

While the timing of Trump's trip to Scotland was not linked to Thursday's referendum in Britain regarding European Union membership, Trump was questioned repeatedly over the U.K.'s vote to leave the EU.

Trump has cheered the outcome and tried to play down American fears about it. The U.S. stock market and global markets plunged Friday after the "Leave" side won.

When pressed about the stock market drop that has caused Americans to fret about retirement plans and savings, Trump suggested that Wall Street was actually worried about Obama's economic policies and the U.S. debt.

Trump has linked the nationalist fervor behind the "Leave" vote to the forces driving his own campaign. He shrugged off the criticism he received for saying that if the value of the British pound falls, more people would spend money at his courses.

"I don't want to have a plummeting pound," Trump said. "But if it does plummet, I do well. And if it does well, I do well. I do well in any case."

About a dozen protesters turned out for Trump near the golf property on Scotland's northeast coast. They included Michael Forbes, who displayed a Mexican flag on his house adjacent to the links. Forbes sparred with Trump several years ago by refusing to sell his home on the tract of land Trump transformed into a golf course.

Trump compared his dissenting neighbors to the crowded field of Republican presidential candidates this year.

"I have one or two that are a little contentious, which is fine because they lost. It's like some of the people I beat in the primaries -- they're not exactly in love with me," Trump said.

Democrats' platform

On the Democratic side, several policy goals campaigned for by Sanders -- such as endorsing steps to break up large Wall Street banks, advocating a $15 hourly wage, and urging an end to the death penalty -- made it into a draft of the party's policy platform approved by party officials early Saturday.

Supporters of Clinton turned back efforts by Sanders' allies to promote a Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system, a carbon tax to address climate change, and a freeze on hydraulic fracking.

While the platform does not bind the Democratic nominee to the stated positions, it serves as a guidepost for the party moving forward.

The Democratic National Convention's full Platform Committee will discuss the draft at a meeting next month in Orlando, Fla., with a vote at the convention in Philadelphia in late July.

Sanders said Friday that he would vote for Clinton in the fall election, but so far has stopped short of fully endorsing the former secretary of state or encouraging his millions of voters to back her candidacy.

The senator has said he wants the platform to reflect his goals -- and those representing him at a St. Louis hotel said they had made progress.

"We lost some, but we won some," said James Zogby, a Sanders supporter on the committee. "We got some great stuff in the platform that has never been in there before." Added Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., a Sanders ally, "We've made some substantial moves forward."

Deliberating late into Friday, Clinton's side gave ground to Sanders in many cases. The document calls for the expansion of Social Security and says Americans should earn at least $15 an hour, referring to the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour as a "starvation wage," a term often used by Sanders.

Sanders has pushed for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Clinton has supported efforts to raise the minimum wage to that level but has said states and cities should raise the bar as high as possible.

Sanders' allies wanted the draft to specify that a $15 per hour minimum wage should be indexed with inflation. Clinton's side struck down that idea, noting the document included a call to "raise and index the minimum wage."

The committee also adopted language that said it supports ways to prevent banks from gambling with taxpayers' bank deposits, "including an updated and modernized version of Glass-Steagall."

Sanders wants to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment-banking activities. Clinton does not but says her proposed financial changes would cast a wider net by regulating the banking system.

Also in the draft is a call for the abolition of the death penalty. Clinton said during a debate this year that capital punishment should be used only in limited cases involving "heinous crimes." Sanders said the government should not use it.

Sanders, an opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was unable to get language into the document opposing the trade deal. As a result, the party avoided putting the platform at odds with Obama.

Clinton has also opposed the deal. Committee members backed a measure that said "there are a diversity of views in the party" on the pact and reaffirmed that Democrats contend that any trade deal "must protect workers and the environment."

The panel deliberated for about nine hours after several late nights and long hours of policy exchanges between the two campaigns and the Democratic National Committee.

Sanders, in a statement, said he was "disappointed and dismayed" that the group voted down the measure opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But he said he was pleased with the proposals on Glass-Steagall and the death penalty -- and vowed to fight on.

"Our job is to pass the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party," he said.

In Washington state, meanwhile, Obama told Democratic donors that "it's up to you" after the failure to move ahead with gun legislation in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings.

Obama spoke Friday night at a fundraiser for Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, the first of two events he was headlining for Democratic candidates in the state. Obama was there to help his party make inroads in state races and in Congress by raising money for their campaigns.

Information for this article was contributed by Kevin Cirilli of Bloomberg News; by Jonathan Lemire, Ken Thomas and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; and by Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post.

A Section on 06/26/2016

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