{"id":29722,"date":"2016-03-06T09:02:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-06T17:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/trumps-gop-rivals-attack-his-flexibility-on-policies\/"},"modified":"2016-03-06T09:02:47","modified_gmt":"2016-03-06T17:02:47","slug":"trumps-gop-rivals-attack-his-flexibility-on-policies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/trumps-gop-rivals-attack-his-flexibility-on-policies\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s GOP rivals attack his ‘flexibility’ on policies"},"content":{"rendered":"

WARREN, Mich.<\/strong> \u2014 With an eye on the general election \u2014 and suddenly \u201cflexible\u201d on immigration \u2014 Donald Trump has backed off from some of the hardline rhetoric that has fueled his presidential campaign, at least for the moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cBelieve it or not, I\u2019m a unifier,\u201d Trump offered during a raucous rally Friday in suburban Detroit. \u201cWe are going to unify our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republican adversary Ted Cruz wasn\u2019t having it. \u201cDonald is telling us he will betray us on everything he\u2019s campaigned on,\u201d he said as he campaigned in Maine, one of five states voting in weekend primaries and caucuses.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s apparent outbreak of moderation on several fronts, including the most inflammatory one, immigration, comes after a dominant Super Tuesday performance that extended his reach for the Republican nomination and as GOP establishment figures stepped up to assail him.<\/p>\n

In the rollicking Republican debate Thursday night, Trump retreated from a position paper on his website, saying he had swung in favor of more temporary H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers. His stance against that had been one of the few specific policies he had laid out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m changing, I\u2019m changing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need highly skilled people in this country.\u201d Hours later, his campaign released a statement backing away from the new position, deepening the sense that Trump\u2019s agenda may be less strategic than improvisational.<\/p>\n

More broadly, he spoke of the virtues of compromise.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of immigration \u2014 and almost anything else \u2014 there always has to be some, you know, tug and pull and deal,\u201d Trump added. \u201cYou have to be able to have some flexibility, some negotiation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruz and others lashed out at Trump\u2019s sudden embrace of flexibility on the central issue of his campaign. \u201cFlexible is Washington code word that he\u2019s going to stick it to the people,\u201d Cruz said Friday.<\/p>\n

Campaigning in Kansas, rival Marco Rubio said Trump has shown \u201cconstant movement\u201d on the issue, a \u201cpattern\u201d the Florida senator says is \u201cdisrespectful to voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe finally took a position on … guest workers coming from abroad, and then as soon as the debate was over he changed back,\u201d Rubio said in Topeka, Kansas. He added, \u201cI think it indicates that this is a person who has spent zero time thinking about public policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney, the GOP\u2019s 2012 presidential nominee, followed up a lacerating speech against Trump by declaring Friday he would not vote for the billionaire if he became the standard-bearer in the fall. Even Trump\u2019s 2016 rivals, some of them mercilessly denigrated by him, said they\u2019d support the GOP nominee even if it\u2019s him.<\/p>\n

Romney told NBC\u2019s \u201cToday\u201d show he would \u201cdo everything within the normal political bounds to make sure we don\u2019t nominate Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also this week, Republican foreign-policy luminaries from diverse flanks of the party wrote an open letter opposing Trump\u2019s candidacy, for his \u201chateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric,\u201d his \u201cembrace of the expansive use of torture\u201d and more.<\/p>\n

Trump is showing new sensitivity on these matters.<\/p>\n

He said Friday he understands the U.S. is \u201cbound by laws and treaties\u201d and he will not order U.S. military officials to violate or disobey those laws if elected president. His statement attenuated earlier comments that he would revive waterboarding in interrogations \u2014 which is now illegal \u2014 and \u201ca lot worse,\u201d and that he would target the wives and children of suspected extremists.<\/p>\n

This was a switch of sorts from the debate the night before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese animals over in the Middle East, that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we\u2019re having a hard problem with waterboarding?\u201d he offered in the debate. \u201cWe should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the softened tone on some issues, though, Trump is still Trump.<\/p>\n

He canceled an appearance at the American Conservative Union\u2019s Conservative Political Action Conference, often a can\u2019t-miss event for candidates catering to the right. It was there Friday that Ben Carson brought a formal end to his campaign for president, where he drew an adoring standing ovation and said there are \u201ca lot of people who love me, they just won\u2019t vote for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s decision to skip the meeting, meanwhile, \u201csends a clear message to conservatives,\u201d the unhappy group tweeted.<\/p>\n

Trump showed no mercy for his critics when he spoke at the Detroit-area rally.<\/p>\n

He repeatedly called Marco Rubio \u201cLittle Marco,\u201d Cruz \u201cLying Ted,\u201d and introduced a new pet name for Romney: \u201cStupid Mitt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is a stupid person,\u201d the 2016 Republican front-runner said of the party\u2019s 2012 nominee.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press writer Bill Barrow contributed to this report from Topeka, Kansas.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Steve Peoples and Jill Colvin on Twitter at: http:\/\/twitter.com\/sppeoples and http:\/\/twitter.com\/colvinj<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WARREN, Mich. \u2014 With an eye on the general election \u2014 and suddenly \u201cflexible\u201d on immigration \u2014 Donald Trump has backed off from some of the hardline rhetoric that has fueled his presidential campaign, at least for the moment. \u201cBelieve it or not, I\u2019m a unifier,\u201d Trump offered during a raucous rally Friday in suburban […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":29723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-29722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29722"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=29722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}