WGBH News - Congressman Lynch Hopeful Trump Will Remain Inconsistent
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By Tori Bedford
One week into the presidential victory of Donald Trump, the American people are still a bit unclear about what's in the cards from the recent President-elect. "With some of the things he's talked about on the campaign trail, he's already changed his direction, so I'm not sure what to expect," Congressman Lynch said in an interview with Boston Public Radio Wednesday. "The reality today of what he is saying is far different from what we heard on the campaign trail."
Trump campaigned on the promise of an "impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful" wall along the Southern border of Mexico, which Mexico would fund. In an interview Sunday with 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl, Trump said he was willing to accept "some fencing" in "certain areas."
A statement from December 2015, still on Trump's campaign website, reads, "Donald J. Trump is 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." In an interview with Fox News, Trump amended the ban to exclude the 5,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. military and his "many Muslim friends" would be exempt as well. In June, Trump took to Twitter to clarify: "We must suspend immigration from regions linked with terrorism until a proven vetting method is in place," he wrote.
"He's saying we're going to look at some of the countries that have active terrorist activity going on, and we're going to vet those people," Lynch said, "which is basically what we've been doing all along."
According to Lynch, these inconsistencies could result in a positive outcome. "There is some indication there that there's retrenchment," he said. "In that respect, those are fights that we might not have as big a fight as we thought we were going to have."
Lynch joined 150 House members in signing a letter from Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline, urging Trump to rescind his appointment of Breitbart's Stephen Bannon to White House chief strategist. "We were hoping that he would pick people not necessarily that we agree with, but that we can work with," Lynch said. "In that case, he's picking someone to burns bridges, versus someone who builds them."
According to Lynch, certain considerations are more reasonable, like U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire. "Even though we don't agree with them, we think: okay, we can live with that," he said. "There are some other people, [Former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, Chris Christie
we'll just have to see how it goes. He won the election, so he gets to pick those people, and we'll just have to see who he picks and what his strategy is."
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