The president-elect now “doesn’t wish to pursue” prosecution of Hillary Clinton over her email scandal, spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday on MSNBC. After pledging to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter—and holding campaign rallies with crowds chanting, “Lock her up!”—Trump is now “thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign aren’t among them,” according to Conway.
Talk about being flexible.
The prosecution flip-flip came the same day a majority of Americans in a new Quinnipiac University poll said Trump won’t follow through on two of his signature campaign promises. “The consensus among voters: He won’t get Mexico to pay for the wall and he won’t take out ISIS,” Tim Malloy, the poll’s assistant director said in a statement. “He’s not honest, nor is he level-headed.”
Oh, good.
Voters do apparently believe Trump has “strength and leadership,” along with the ability to create jobs. As Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini tweeted, the new polling also suggests voters take the president-elect “seriously but not literally,” to use a now oft-quoted phrase from Salena Zito. The problem, of course, is that we should more or less be able to take a presidential candidate’s promises literally—both in terms of what we can look forward to and what we must guard against.