Originally Posted by wufwugy
Thanks for asking.
Regarding politics, his core beliefs are a mix of conservative/libertarian/classic liberal, and they're pretty much all America First. This includes stuff like he wants to in general reduce government regulation of business, reduce taxes, and reduce crime. On social stuff, he generally wants increase individual freedom. On foreign policy, he respects domains (like he isn't into toppling regimes) and carries a big stick and follows through. On immigration and trade, he's about reducing crime and special treatment.
If we go into detail into any of these, I think we can find that even as what he telegraphs can be contradictory, the final landing spot is coherent. Taking Syria related foreign policy for example, he has said things like we shouldn't bomb yet also said things like we should bomb. Maybe it's poor articulation on his part for why he says inconsistent things or maybe it's negotiation tactic, but at least we have context to work with. The contexts show things like this: he thinks setting a red line and backing down is retarded, he thinks toppling regimes that haven't broken international relations enough and are not a threat to other countries to warrant toppling is retarded, he thinks telegraphing your actual moves in war is retarded.I see you enjoy horoscopes.A good encapsulation of his core beliefs is his Supreme Court nomination. He's said all sorts of shit on courts; he's said stuff like his liberal pro-abortion sister would be a great SCOTUS judge (IIRC). When you look at what he has said on topics related to the Supreme Court, you can make an easy case that he's incoherent or not conservative or any sort of thing.
But what happened is that from the beginning, the majority of conservatives who voted for him believed that he was a strong conservative and that he would nominate a strong conservative to replace Scalia. How did they "know" that? Who knows? There are theories. Regardless, they believed it, and Trump confirmed it when his final move on the Scalia replacement was to create a list of acceptable conservative judges and promise to nominate one of them if he wins.
At that time, maybe he didn't know which judge, but every one of them was well liked by conservatives. Even so, a lot of discussion went on and that list got narrowed down and finally the judge Trump nominated was widely considered by conservatives the best choice he could have made given the circumstances.
So what we have here is a situation where if you look at what Trump says, you get all sorts of different stuff, but if you look at what Trump does (more specifically what his meaningful actions are), the result landed square on a strongly conservative position. The question then could be "but does he truly believe those conservative things", and the answer could be "who knows?" What we do know is that he consistently lands on results that conservatives like even though what he says might be all over the place.
Of course, this raises another question: "is what he says actually all over the place, or are we missing something or seeing something that isn't there?" I think the answer is probably yes and no. I think he truly does say some stuff he doesn't necessarily believe because that's good negotiation tactic. Though I also think that a good deal of the time he's saying what he truly believes but he doesn't articulate well, so it looks different than he intended. I could be wrong, who knows
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