How Trump uses 'cynical ambiguity' to downplay his extremist ideas: analysis

Whether Democrats stick with President Joe Biden as their 2024 presidential nominee or look for someone else, one of their key arguments against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is that his MAGA movement is pushing an authoritarian agenda. Democrats have been slamming Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's detailed, in-depth blueprint for a second Trump Administration — as a recipe for autocracy.

Yet Trump, in some interviews, downplays the more extreme ideas he has promoted.

In a blistering editorial published on July 7, the Washington Post's editorial board slams the Trump campaign's "strategic ambiguity" as a "cynical" effort to obscure just how extreme and "unpopular" some of his proposals have been.

READ MORE: Historian warns Trump 'imperial presidency' will be 'huge shock' to Americans: 'Never been here before'

"Abortion is the issue Mr. Trump's team most fears," the Post's editorial board argues. "The GOP's 2016 platform endorsed a 20-week national ban on the procedure…. There are other thorny issues."

The board continues, "The 2016 platform said Congress and states should be allowed to ban same-sex marriage and supported the rights of parents to force their gay children into conversion therapy…. Sidestepping divisive questions might be politically expedient, limiting attention on the party's increasingly out-of-step agenda."

The post board, stresses, however, that voters need to know what Trump's "far-right administration-in-waiting wants to impose on the nation" — from abortion to Project 2025.

"(Trump) and his allies are floating ideas that would be disastrous for America, including 10 percent across-the-board tariffs, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and politicizing the civil service," the Post's editorial board warns. "He has said that he's running to exact 'revenge' and 'retribution' against his critics while promising not to be a dictator 'other than Day One.'"

READ MORE: 'Myth of institutionalism': John Roberts lays out blueprint for dictatorship

The Post editorial writers add, "He gets away with such talk in part because he does not let himself get pinned down on specifics. Voters should demand better than such cynical strategic ambiguity."

READ MORE: Beware: Trump is Project 2025 — and he cannot escape it

Read The Washington Post's full editorial at this link (subscription required).