WSJ’s Kissel: On Policy, Trump Is ‘Very Similar’ to Hillary

‘If Donald Trump is the nominee, we’ll analyze his policies just as we would analyze Hillary’s’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

UNKNOWN FEMALE: “But, Mary, do you think it will have dissuaded any people who supported Trump?”
KISSEL: “Trump seems to have a ceiling. It’s around 30 percent to 35 percent. So people —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Mary, he’s at 49 percent in the latest national poll.”
GEIST: “But look who’s voted.”
KISSEL: “Look at the average of the people who have actually voted.”
SCARBOROUGH: “I’m saying, though, there’s always a momentum to this and as we’ve said if he wins New Hampshire he’ll blow through South Carolina and the deep south and the latest — I guess it’s a CNN poll — has him up.”
RATTNER: “I think we’ll find out where the momentum lies and whether he can get past Ohio and Florida.”
KISSEL: “How many people were polled in that CNN poll? 300?”
SCARBOROUGH: “You’re sounding like Walter Mondale in 1984 now. Any time somebody starts asking questions like that from a reputable poll, you’re like, OK, Mondale, you’ll lose 49 states tonight.”
KISSEL: “Look, the voters will get the candidate they want. There’s no incentive on for the guys on that stage to drop out. You saw a clear division between the candidate last night and it became very clear early on that Trump has no principles, he has no policies and he’s making it up.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Marco Rubio last night said if Donald Trump was the nominee he would endorse and support Donald Trump. If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, will the ‘Wall Street Journal’ editorial page support Donald Trump?”
KISSEL: “If you read us every day, Joe, you know we don’t endorse candidates.”
SCARBOROUGH: “You do everything but endorse candidates.”
KISSEL: “We talk about policy. We try to help readers —
SCARBOROUGH: “I read your paper everyday! I know who you like, who you hate, who you loathe, who you adore.”
KISSEL: “So then that’s a nonsense question.”
SCARBOROUGH: “No, it’s not a nonsense question.”
KISSEL: “Because we talk about policy.”
SCARBOROUGH: “So you all will be framing the presidential race as you do every four years between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Are you going to frame in the Donald Trump’s favor? Hillary Clinton’s favor?”
KISSEL: “If Donald Trump is the nominee, we’ll analyze his policies just as we would analyze Hillary’s. In many respects he’s very similar to Hillary. He doesn’t want any kind of entitlement reform. He thinks government should create jobs. He hasn’t talked about things like, for example, school choice which Kasich talked about last night which is the only way to reform public schools. By the way, one of the spokespeople for Hillary is the teachers’ union chief. So we will talk about what the consequences of his policies, if he has nominated. I think last night the interesting thing to me was that Ted Cruz actually came out with a very respectable and cogent electability argument. Cruz essentially said, look, I’m a adult, I’m not a vulgarian, I’m a conservative, I’ll appoint a supreme court justice who’s conservative and I have real policies here, go and look at it and examine and I have won four states and I beat Hillary in the national polls. It was a strong argument. I think it was a good night.”
RATTNER: “But Cruz has a set of policies on the extreme end of the conservative ideology.”
KISSEL: “What do you mean by that?”

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