rudolph giuliani has had an extensive career, but he is perhaps best known for leading new york city to recovery after the terrorist attacks of sept. 11, 2001. now he<u+2019>s a prominent member of president-elect donald trump <u+2019>s transition team and emerged after the election as one of the top contenders for the post of secretary of state. the wall street journal<u+2019>s gerard baker spoke with mr. giuliani about mr. trump<u+2019>s positions and plans. what follows are edited excerpts of the conversation. mr. baker: give us your sense of what the immediate agenda is for the trump presidency. mr. giuliani: you<u+2019>re going to see very much the policies he talked about. i analogize this election to when andrew jackson defeated what was the almost emerging nobility of america. the american people had had enough of this elite, we needed somebody who represented us. that<u+2019>s what happened here. the people revolted against the elite that was trying to force on them policies they didn<u+2019>t agree with or didn<u+2019>t address what they were concerned about. trump has to deliver on securing the borders. he has to lower taxes on everybody, so everybody gets a little bit more money in their pocket. and he has to lower the corporate tax, which could be one of the biggest things he can do to ignite our economy. he has to work on repatriation of money. you do that, and you<u+2019>re going to see an economy that<u+2019>s growing at numbers where we can sustain a lot of the other things that we have to do. on trade, part of it could be the rhetoric of a campaign. part of it can be the misinterpretation of the media. you<u+2019>re not talking about a man who<u+2019>s against free trade. you<u+2019>re talking about a man who<u+2019>s against unfair deals. mr. baker: the two first appointments for the administration were reince priebus and steve bannon. bannon is an aggressive populist flamethrower. reince priebus is a much more traditional conservative republican. who<u+2019>s going to win that fight? mr. giuliani: donald trump. donald trump is an extraordinarily smart man. exposing him to different viewpoints is the very best thing we can do. it<u+2019>s exactly what obama didn<u+2019>t do, although he said he was going to do it. mr. baker: let me talk about steve bannon. there has been a lot of concern about some of the things that he<u+2019>s associated with. he has been accused of racism. he has been accused of anti-semitism. mr. giuliani: i haven<u+2019>t seen any of that in steve. i<u+2019>ve seen a very smart, very bright man, very worldly man. i also think something happens to you when the election<u+2019>s over. it<u+2019>s not that you change your positions. but you begin to realize, <u+201c>i<u+2019>ve got to bring in more people. i<u+2019>ve got to broaden my horizons.<u+201d> i don<u+2019>t think that just happens to the president. i think that happens to the chief of staff, the policy adviser, the communications director, secretary of defense, attorney general, secretary of state. when you<u+2019>re out there just criticizing, it<u+2019>s one thing. when you actually get on the inside, there<u+2019>s a certain weight of responsibility for the american people that is on your shoulders. steve bannon is the kind of guy who gets that. mr. baker: that change you talk about, have you seen that in donald trump in the last week? mr. giuliani: from the moment he went to see barack obama, the way in which they dealt with each other, the way in which he<u+2019>s conducting himself, his attempt to try, as best he can, to bring america together. all these protests, i think they<u+2019>re going to go away. they<u+2019>re just going to happen for a while, because some people are disappointed, and they<u+2019>re angry. a little bit is soros funded and driven. but i think that<u+2019>s going to go away. and what we<u+2019>re going to find is a much more worldly and expansive president than we ever realized we were electing. mr. baker: is this going to be an administration that is going to take on big business issues? are big mergers going to be opposed by the trump administration? mr. giuliani: i won<u+2019>t be attorney general. so i won<u+2019>t have to decide. i don<u+2019>t know who<u+2019>s going to be attorney general. i think you<u+2019>ll see a conservative approach to antitrust law. if it<u+2019>s predatory pricing, where there are alternatives, you<u+2019>ll probably see a challenge to it. if it<u+2019>s a situation in which there<u+2019>s no alternative but a large conglomerate, i think you<u+2019>ll see the justice department passing on that. the last thing in the world you<u+2019>re going to see is an antibusiness administration. donald trump realizes that he got elected, to a very large extent, on something he said in so many speeches: <u+201c>jobs, jobs, jobs.<u+201d> so being pro-business is being pro-jobs. that doesn<u+2019>t mean there won<u+2019>t be a necessary level of regulation. but one thing that president-elect trump told me, he said, <u+201c>one of the things i learned over running for president, when i began, i thought the biggest concern that businesses had was taxes. it<u+2019>s true they are concerned about taxes. but they tell me their biggest concern is regulation. i<u+2019>m going to cut those damn regulations in half.<u+201d> mr. baker: during the campaign, president-elect trump said that he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and possibly prosecute hillary clinton. is he going to? mr. giuliani: that<u+2019>s a decision he should make when he appoints an attorney general. the attorney general should sit down and study it and give him a very reasoned balance of two things. one is the idea that we don<u+2019>t want to become a country where we have political vindictiveness after an election. number two, we don<u+2019>t want to be a country of unequal protection of the law. if the attorney general decides that they<u+2019>re not that far beyond the pale, maybe we just put it behind us. if the attorney general decides that they have to be investigated, then it shouldn<u+2019>t be donald trump<u+2019>s attorney general, it should be an independent counsel who investigates it. mr. baker: president-elect trump said the iran deal that president obama struck was a disaster. what would you do about that? mr. giuliani: the president has a lot of options. because president obama didn<u+2019>t do what he should<u+2019>ve done under the constitution. he should<u+2019>ve submitted that to the united states senate. the next president can disavow it as a matter of law. either he should, or he should use that power to renegotiate it. write to reports@wsj.com
rudolph giuliani on trump<u+2019>s immediate agenda - wsj
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