Donald Trump finally talked policy on Tuesday night. Here’s what (little) he said.

Washington Post (The Fix)

By Philip Bump

August 11, 2015

Donald Trump finally talked policy on Tuesday night. Here’s what (little) he said.

"Earlier today, I asked Donald Trump to get specific about some of his policy positions," Fox News' Sean Hannity said during part 1 of his hour-long interview with Trump that aired Tuesday night. "Here's what he said."

What follows are those responses, compacted but matching the verbiage and structure of his replies.

Immigration

Hannity: You talked about Mexico. How quickly could you build the wall? How do you make them pay for the wall?

Trump: It's so easy!

Trump's proposal: We give Mexico "tens of billions of dollars a year," 1 but that doesn't really have anything to do with it.

We're not talking about a Great Wall of China, which is a "serious" wall. That wall is 13,000 miles long. 2 The Mexican wall would only be about 1,000 miles or so.

The options for paying for it? A tariff, or they just give us the money. They need us badly, and Trump will be friends with Mexico.

Hannity clarifies: You want to do business with us, you pay for the wall? Trump: Of course! You know how easy that is?

Mexico will pay 100 percent of the cost. And if they don't, we'll charge them a tariff, because we need the wall. When you look at all of the murders and crime that's happening? 3 Mexico is sending some rough people. Bad dudes.

Healthcare

Hannity: Again: Go to specifics, details. Obamacare: What's your alternative?

Trump: Okay.

Trump's proposal: People will have health savings accounts. It costs the country and people very little. It's an amazing system. Prompted by Hannity, Trump adds that he'll cover catastrophic coverage and pre-existing conditions.

Obamacare is going to cost this country $1.6 trillion in 2016 when it kicks in. 4 (Obama will be playing golf on one of Trump's courses by then.) Premiums are going up 40 percent, Hannity points out, 5 and Trump says it's more than that. You can't use the coverage unless you get hit by a truck because the deductible is so high.

We also need to get rid of state-line coverage boundaries established by insurance companies, and every American could choose from all the competitors.

So that companies don't go out of business, the government will give a point to the insurers.

Planned Parenthood

Hannity: Talk about a war on women. ... You said you would shut down the government to defund them. You also talked about some of the good things that they do.

Trump: They do good things!

Hannity: With the debt we have should we give them a penny?

Trump's proposal: Abortion is a small but brutal part of what Planned Parenthood does. 6 They also serve women.

Jeb Bush was so bad on women's health issues the other day! 7 We have to help women.

The answer: "Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don't do the funding for the stuff that they want. There are many ways you can do that, Sean."

And so ended the policy specifics portion of the interview.

Footnotes:

1. We give tens of billions of dollars overall. According to ForeignAssistance.gov, we expect to give $137 million in 2015.

2. The Great Wall of China is 3,170 miles long and took centuries to build. Building a wall now would be faster, but not easy.

3. There is no demonstrable correlation between illegal immigration and crime.

4.  Initial cost estimates put the cost of Obamacare near Trump's estimate -- over 10 years. A revision from the Congressional Budget Office in March lowered the figure to $1.2 trillion.

5.  Insurance companies requested premium increases along the lines of what Hannity cites. Those are not final increases. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the final average increase will be about 4.4 percent for 2016.

6. Abortion services are a small part, indeed.

7. Bush said that he was "not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women's health issues."

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com