Donald Trump
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Should he be elected president, Donald Trump will not feel obliged to maintain the thaw in United States-Cuba relations brokered by the Obama White House, the Republican nominee said Friday evening.

"[A]ll of the concessions that Barack Obama has granted the Castro regime were done with executive order, which means the next president can reverse them. And that is what I will do unless the Castro regime meets our demands," he said, namely, "religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of political prisoners." The latter demand was not included in Trump's prepared speech and was a major request he apparently added in the moment.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.