Trump says gay marriage is settled law, but he still wants 'pro-life' justices
Image of Donald Trump from Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com.
Donald Trump told 60 Minutes on Sunday that he will quickly nominate a Supreme Court justice, and his court nominees will be “pro-life” and “very pro-Second Amendment.”
But he told Lesley Stahl in the interview that the issue of marriage equality is “irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done. … And I’m fine with that.” Bloomberg News, the New York Times and CBS News (here and here) have stories; a transcript is here.
Trump said that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the issue of abortion will go back to the states. He acknowledged that some women seeking abortions would have to go to other states. Asked if that was OK, he replied, “Well, we’ll see what happens. It’s got a long way to go, just so you understand. That has a long, long way to go.”
Stahl also asked Trump if he would name a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton for her emails. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to think about it,” he said. “I feel that I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on healthcare, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. We want to have a great immigration bill. And I want to focus on all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.”
When pressed by Stahl about a special prosecutor for Clinton, Trump replied, “I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt them. They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them. And I will give you a very, very good and definitive answer the next time we do 60 Minutes together.”
On the subject of immigrants who are in the country illegally, Trump said his priority would be to deport the most dangerous. “What we are going to do,” he said, “is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are going to make a determination at that.”
Trump also said he wanted to secure the border and he still wanted to build a wall. Asked if he would accept a fence rather than a wall, Trump said, “For certain areas I would, but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.”
Updated Nov. 15 to clarify headline.
