Guess Which Candidate Is Actually Getting More Specific On Policy

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Vice President Kamala Harris has been getting plenty of scrutiny and more than little grief over the lack of specificity in her policy agenda .

It’s not hard to see why, though some context might be nice too.

On the one hand, Harris hasn’t sat for interviews or held formal press conferences, or even posted a detailed agenda on her campaign website. Until late last week, when her campaign published a series of proposals to “ lower costs for American families ,” she hadn’t introduced or defended any major initiatives.

And while Harris had made clear in her speeches that she is mostly running on the same mainstream liberal agenda that President Joe Biden had embraced in his budget proposals, that commitment leaves plenty of room for ambiguity ― which, truth be told, her campaign has seemed in no rush to clear up. Last week, one anonymous adviser told The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein that Harris’ team wasn’t especially worried about critics demanding “five-prong policy agenda” items.

But Harris has actually gotten more specific since then, starting with that initiative on cost for American families she introduced Friday.

In addition to its ( controversial ) call for a federal law against price-gouging, the initiative included proposals to give the federal government more leverage over prescription drug prices , to extend extra financial assistance now available to people buying health insurance on their own, to subsidize both the construction and purchase of housing , and to reinstate a COVID-era cash stipend for families with children.

One, two, three ... hey, look at that. Five prongs.

And although the press release accompanying the announcement did not address the all-important question of how Harris intends to fund these initiatives — which, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget , could require up to $2 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade — her aides subsequently made clear their intentions to raise corporate taxes to 28%. The revenue from that alone would likely cover about half the new initiative’s cost.

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on her policy platform, including improving the cost of living for all Americans and to lower costs for middle-class families in Raleigh, North Carolina on Aug. 16.

That’s not the same as committing openly to that tax hike, or to filling out the rest of her presumably ambitious agenda as her campaign has said she’ll do. Holding her to that vow ( as HuffPost’s Jonathan Nicholson does today ) seems completely fair, and downright important on topics like immigration, trade and Gaza where even modest deviations from Biden policies could make a big difference.

But (as Jonathan also notes) a little understanding about timing also seems in order.

So much has happened, so quickly, that it’s easy to forget Harris has been campaigning on her own for just a little more than four weeks — and that, during that period, she’s had to take over the Biden campaign apparatus, pick a running mate and then plan the convention she’s currently staging. Developing and presenting its policy agenda is something that typically takes a presidential campaign many months.

Of course, that raises a whole other question, mostly and oddly missing from this debate: What on earth has Donald Trump been doing this whole time?

The Mystery Of Trump’s Campaign Agenda

Unlike Harris, he had a full primary campaign to develop an agenda. He also is in the unique position of having run two full presidential campaigns before, plus he presided over the executive branch for four years. In theory, he should have all the knowledge, information and staff it takes to put together a campaign agenda clearly, confidently and with detail.

In practice, he has done no such thing.

The Trump campaign doesn’t typically publish the kind of press releases spelling out policy proposals that Harris did last week, let alone the kind of serious white papers with details and experts to back them up as campaigns have traditionally done. And if HuffPost’s experience is indicative, it doesn’t typically answer policy questions with substantive answers. (Multiple email and phone queries for this article yielded no response.)

As for publicly available information, the official Trump website has an “ Agenda 47 ” page that’s more about sloganeering than specifying, with lots of one-sentence items like “End inflation, and make America affordable again” and “Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.”

Donald Trump during his speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

You can then click through to the official Trump-Republican 2024 platform , which has 16 pages of verbiage but not much more in the way of detail. The document has literally no dollar figures attached to its proposals.

The Trump website actually had a bit more information earlier in the campaign, when some of those policy commitments had hyperlinks to short descriptions — among them, the across-the-board 10% tariff on all imports that is the one policy idea Trump has fully, unambiguously embraced.

But many of those policy descriptions, which in some cases are still accessible through online archives, raised as many questions as they answered.

On pages that addressed the auto industry and electric vehicles, for example, Trump vowed to end the “EV mandate” without specifying whether he meant he would simply roll back new emissions rules on automakers (as he has frequently promised to do in speeches) or whether he would also end subsidies on EV production and purchases (which he said last week he might do).

Those subsidies are underwriting a massive boom in factory construction, much of it in red states and districts, which is why Republicans have been quietly urging their leaders in Congress not to repeal them. Clarity on Trump’s intentions here matter a lot to them, and to their constituents too.

But fudging positions on politically difficult issues is nothing new for Trump, who has at various points suggested he would or wouldn’t endorse some kind of national ban on abortion , or would or wouldn’t try once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act . He frequently expresses his views of the day not through speeches or official statements but through inscrutable, grammatically challenged, late-night Truth Social posts.

The “ Obamacare ” example is particularly instructive, because it’s a reminder that Trump’s vague, frequently contradictory and fundamentally unserious approach to policy has been a throughline of his political career.

Trump spent years promising to repeal the landmark health care law while simultaneously promising “insurance for everybody” and that “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” He never provided an alternative plan and once in office he simply embraced proposals on the proverbial Republican shelf — which, as critics had warned all along, would have actually resulted in millions losing their coverage .

There’s a bit of a parallel here to how Trump could lean on Project 2025 , the book-length agenda from the Heritage Foundation whose explicit purpose is to provide a newly elected, philosophically sympathetic president with a governing blueprint. It has the kind of detail that Trump’s campaign material and rhetoric lacks, with calls for everything from regulatory bans on abortion pills to massive cuts in Medicaid to a purging of the federal bureaucracy.

Many of these positions are highly unpopular, which probably helps explain Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the document. But its authors include current and former aides . The head of the project has dismissed Trump’s denials as political posturing, claiming in private that Trump has “blessed” the effort and is “ very supportive of what we do .”

Trump could clarify his intentions by committing more firmly to a full, distinct agenda of his own. He has chosen not to do that, in a way that seems all too familiar — and indicative of how he thinks about policy.