The Millennial View: Trump, Cruz, Rubio aren’t that different
Is Donald Trump really so much crazier or more extreme than the other Republican presidential candidates?
[...] the push for the establishment to coalesce around a viable, more “moderate” alternative.
Someone like Marco Rubio, perhaps, or maybe even Ted “I’m not here to make friends” Cruz, the two candidates battling for second place behind The Donald, and whom GOP leadership is counting on to rescue the party from Trumpian extremism.
On immigration, Trump wants to build a wall and round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.
On taxes, Trump proposes cuts that would cost trillions of dollars; are not paid for; are highly regressive; and are even more regressive if you assume they’ll actually be offset by spending cuts, which would disparately hurt poor and middle-class Americans.
Both Cruz and Rubio say they want to let people buy insurance across state lines and expand tax preferences for spending on health care (through health savings accounts and/or tax credits for individual insurance).
Trump plans to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” which would include letting people buy insurance across state lines and expanding tax preferences for spending on health care (through health savings accounts).
Trump also frequently advocates not letting people die in the streets and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, stances that are usually more associated with the left than the right.
When it comes to human rights, Trump, Rubio and Cruz seem to be jockeying for who can commit more war crimes.
Trump wants to bring back waterboarding, plus “a hell of a lot worse”; Cruz wants to “carpet bomb” parts of the Middle East until we learn whether “sand can glow in the dark”; and Rubio repeatedly declines to answer questions about using torture, not because he finds torture morally abhorrent but because he doesn’t want to give away his interrogation strategy to terrorists.
(Cruz only recently endorsed mass deportation, for example.) But regardless of where on the ideological spectrum the candidates started, the fact remains that today the three of them are largely indistinguishable from one another on most major policy stances.
(He makes dog whistles audible to humans.) Trump may be less civil than the others, but in the age of reality TV, incivility sells.