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Listcicle: What Trump Didn’t Do
On the occasion of PDT’s first State of the Union address, let’s go back and take a look at some of the things predicted for the Trump presidency that have not happened, won’t you?
- Trump has not governed as a New York limousine liberal. That may have been the major fear of a Trump presidency, that he would govern like the Democrats (including Chuck Schumer and Hillary) he had donated much money to in the past. Instead, his first year has been, as Mitt Romney might say, “severely conservative” in his judicial and cabinet appointment, his aggressive regulatory repeals, or his outreach to conservative groups. It is unimaginable that Marco Rubio or John Kasich would have governed as conservatively as PDT. Indeed, Anti-Trump “conservative” pundits like Bill Kristol are the ones sounding like limousine liberals these days.
- Trump has not crashed the stock market, confounding the predictions of pundits like tentacle-hentai aficionado Kurt Eichenwald. Indeed, the markets have soared to record highs. Critics claim that Obama actually had more percentage growth in the stock market, but Obama’s stock markets were bouncing off the bottom and the increases were fed by massive infusions of cash from the US Treasury (“quantitative easing”). The Trump gains appear to be organic.
- Trump has not instigated a massive, economy-killing trade war. There have been targeted protectionist actions against Canadian airplanes, Korean washers and dryers, and Chinese solar panels (or, as fans of ‘Rifftrax’ call them, “soar pommels.”) Even if you disagree with these actions, they fall short of all-out trade war, and may be simply negotiating tactics to get to better trade agreements; which Trump promised he would do.
- Trump has not repealed Obamacare, mainly because, as it turns out, “Repeal and Replace” was an empty Republican campaign slogan. Not only do Republicans love government-run health care as much as Democrats do, but they resist even modest, incremental changes to the law, i.e., “skinny repeal.”
- Trump has not built a massive, beautiful border wall; mainly because Republicans really don’t want to stop illegal immigration. Remember, in 2006, Congress authorized the construction of 900 miles of triple-layer border fencing. The very next year in 2007, they stripped out all funding for it. Graham and Durbin tried to pull off the same trick for DACA Amnesty, but PDT didn’t bite.
- Trump has not imprisoned or murdered journalists for opposition to his regime. Indeed, watch CNN or MSDNC for 10 minutes and you can see that nothing is inhibiting the flow of anti-Trump propaganda. Sorry, Jeff Flake, but just because you personally despise PDT doesn’t make him Stalin.
- Trump’s election has not inspired a wave of anti-gay/anti-immigrant hate crime. There was an uptick in reported hate crimes after Trump was elected, but almost all of these turned out to be hoaxes.
- Trump has not set-up concentration camps for gay people, where Mike Pence in a leather Nazi uniform would be hooking up gay teens to car batteries. (Yeah, Rachel Maddow said this would happen.) Gay marriage has not even been repealed. The worst “setback” gays may endure under Trump is that bakeries may be allowed to decline to bake cakes for their weddings, forcing them to go across the street to a different baker who will do so gladly. And that’s only if Anthony Kennedy doesn’t find a right to wedding cake in the Constitution.
- PDT has not been “soft on Russia.” This idea was ginned up as part of the “Trump-Russia” conspiracy theory, that PDT and all who voted for him were puppets of Vladimir Putin. Instead, with new sanctions, a military build-up, and aggressive counters to Russia’s allies, PDT has been stronger against the Red Menace than Obama; who at this point in his term had sold out missile defense for Eastern Europe and was negotiating to diminish the US nuclear arsenal.
- Trump hasn’t launched a global thermonuclear war.
And finally, Trump hasn’t resigned in disgrace or been impeached because of the Trump-Russia scandal, as predicted by Paul Krugman and many, many others.
Published in General
Nice post, and I love that you point out #4 and #5 are the fault of Republicans in Congress, not Trump. I’m honestly not sure at this point what else can be expected of the man, he’s doing everything he can to give us the victories we’ve wanted for decades.
Can you imagine what a Hillary administration would be doing right now? I shudder at the thought. I am very grateful that we have President Trump and not President Clinton, for in the end that was the choice before us, one or the other. Why that simple concept is so difficult for so many remains a mystery to me.
Good post. Just as I’ll defend Trump when I think he deserves it (which is much of the time), I’ll defend the GOP when I think it does as well (which is right now).
Forty-nine Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare, while three voted to keep it. Every Democrat voted against repeal. For those who think there’s little difference between Republicans and Democrats, there’s evidence that that view is mistaken.
And as for modest, incremental changes: the Republicans successfully repealed the individual mandate. That’s actually a pretty big change.
I approve of Trump’s performance and have made peace with his various quirks, flaws, and eccentricities. I think it would be good for us to not cast Trump and the GOP in opposition any more than we have to. For better or worse, they need each other over the next three years — and we need both.
Excellent post. And Trump has not over turned the constitution and become a dictator. Trust me there were those that claimed it.
His failure at numbers 4 & 5 are not his fault. I still believe #5, the wall, will get built. Even though he has not repealed it, he has gutted Obamacare by taking away its source of revenue. He will eventually get all those on that list.
Fake news. 49 of 52 Republicans voted for repeal. In case your math skills are rusty, that means only 3 voted against it. Unfortunately 3 Republican defections happened to be enough to kill it, but the claim that all Republicans except Trump are to blame is not supported by the facts.
Yes, with the notable exception of Ben Shapiro, it’s been difficult to find NeverTrump pundits who haven’t outed themselves as squishes who share essentially the same cultural biases as the Left (and in the case of people like Kristol and Rubin, policy preferences as well).
What I worry about is that he and his supporters may be so focused on The Wall that they’ll be willing to surrender on much more effective immigration control measures such as e-verify, ending chain migration, and ending the visa lottery as long as they get The [redacted] Wall. Ever since Luis Gutierrez caved on this, I’ve been worried that the Dems plan to use The Wall to ooh-shiny Trump away from real reform.
In my opinion, the biggest missteps with Trump so far have been some of his stupid, needless fights that have distracted from the fine job he’s done overall. First with me were his idiotic comments about conservatives in the House being “mean” for pushing the very Obamacare repeal the he himself ran on. Trump deserves the blame for the O-care repeal fiasco. He was a horrible leader where a decent leader gets something far better passed. He blew it. His repulsive fights with gold star families where a huge reason why his accomplishments aren’t translating into better numbers for him and republicans. His handling of the refugee crisis was embarrassing and clumsy but that’s the kind of stuff you get with someone with so little experience who has done a poor job of hiring staff. In the end, that one worked out well for him and all of us.
I actually see some recent improvement in how he carries himself. I think that as he sees more success, he will become less deranged in the face of criticism. I also think that he is slowly surrounding himself with better people and building stronger ties to some of the many really good conservative in DC. I think we’ll look back on this year as the most chaotic of his tenure and as you shared, it was still pretty darn good. I’m actually looking forward to 2018. I think we easily hold the House and pick-up 6-7 seats in the Senate. If Trump actually improves on his 2017 performance, and this Russia-gate and memo-gate garbage implodes on the Dems as I suspect it will, we could well be in for another Roaring 20’s!
Good catch; yes, a lot of people predicted that thing would happen and still do; not recognizing it for the hysteria that it is.
But what if it was only orchestrated in such a way to look like only three Republicans voted against it? It only took 3 no’s and they all came from senators with nothing to lose. It’s pretty routine for senate leadership to allow senators to vote certain ways depending on their constituency so long as the desired outcome is achieved. I’m not confident that didn’t happen.
And even before that vote, the repeal and replace proposals were so watered down they hardly meant anything. Murky and Collins got the subsidies they wanted in the skinny repeal, but still voted no.
Jonah Goldberg, KDW certainly come to mind.
Oh, right. Trump supporters don’t read National Review anymore.
Nevermind. Carry on.
The difference between the Priebus/Bannon era and the Kelly era is, indeed, staggering. If nothing else, credit to Trump for recognizing that there was a problem.
A criticism I have of wildly anti-Trump people is that they so often come up with ways of explaining away his very real accomplishments. It always seems contrived to me, a way to deny credit where it’s due. For me, that undermines their credibility.
The Senate Republicans have been consistently conservative in their voting, with a small number of predictable centrists — and one tiresome “maverick” — who routinely gum things up. I think hypothesizing a conspiracy is unnecessary. Let’s all give Trump his due. Let’s all give the GOP its due as well.
Anything Trump says is not his fault.
FIFY. There’s always hope? :-/
I agree those other immigration issues are definitely more important, at least to me. But I understand the political need to get the wall. If he doesn’t get that and gets everything else it will be seen as a political failure since he put so much political energy into it.
The wall is not even all that expensive, $25B in a $2-3T budget, and it doesn’t even have to come all in one year. While the effectiveness of the wall may be questionable, the wall does make a statement, that we are a sovereign country and not some potential European Union conglomerate of nations under a higher form of government.
I don’t know. There are a lot of things on immigration that are actually more important that the wall. I am hoping here, but I hope that Trump is using this as a bargaining chip. He gets real change and the democrats get to say they did not build the wall. I think that would work for a lot of Trump voters and would not be seen as a political failure. Remember all those rallies during the election? People chanting that they would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. An awful lot of them were not serious that this would happen. Any meaningful change is a win.
This is pure conspiracy theory.
Moderator Note:
Please avoid these generalizations.Trump supporters love conspiracy theories. It might be the one unifying feature of Trump supporters.Whenever Trump spreads some conspiracy theory, Obama was born in Kenya and the Democratic party has been hiding that fact for 50 years or Ted Cruz’s dad was part of the CIA plot to kill Kennedy,
his supporters go crazy for it.Look, I am a Trump supporter. I am not a Birther and I think what Trump said about Cruz’s dad was ridiculous.
I really appreciate people who don’t like Trump implying everyone who disagrees with them must be some crazy conspiracy nut. Thanks for the civil conversation.
I agree that an actual wall is not as important as other immigration safeguards, but some kind of wall/barrier must be built anyway.
It was a promise made too strongly and too often for Trump to back down.
Democrats, including Hillary herself, have supported and even voted for a wall in the past. Now they claim it will cost too much! Ha!
I guarantee you if Trump relents on that issue for any reason- even fantasic ones, Democrats will never let him live it down. It would be “read my lips, no new taxes” times 1000.
Moderator Note:
Not helping.But you have to admit conspiracy theories are very popular with his supporters, and with Trump.No, it’s not far removed from how the Senate works. If there’s a bill coming up that’s going to pass anyway, Chuck Schumer might tell Red State Democrat senators like Heidi Heitkemp and Joe Manchin it’s OK to vote with Republicans so as not to hurt them with their constituencies. But when it actually matters, the senate leadership makes sure their people vote the party’s interest.
The pattern is clear if one is paying attention. The Chamber of Commerce wanted corporate tax cuts, so they got through. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want Obamacare repeal (because the insurance company subsidies are awesome!), and doesn’t want border security (because cheap labor is awesome!), so those items fail.
“Trump-Russia” is a conspiracy theory. Observing that Republican senators will screw over their voters in favor of their donors is just pattern recognition.
Because it never occurred to conservatives that their government might be working against their interests — before Donald Trump.
This is absolute hooey. Try to make an interesting comment rather than some blanket accusation. Totally unfounded and should be redacted.
Yeah it is how things work in Congress. If a bill has enough votes to pass, Leadership can give individual members the freedom to vote against it. That said, I don’t think that is what happened on Obamacare repeal. I don’t recall any threats, but Leadership was begging and bribing to get the votes.
I don’t ascribe malice, that they did not want to repeal it. More incompetence/ laziness. They promised this for 7 years. They should have had some reasonable outline that the Republican members could agree to vote on. It did not pass because they did not take the time to work out a good plan, but slapped something together more or less in secret.
Plenty of conservatives believe the CIA assassinated Kennedy, heck -plenty of conservatives believe Cruz’s father was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Plenty of conservatives believe the entire Democratic party conspired to keep Obama’s place of birth a secret. Plenty of conservatives believe the US government is hiding alien visitors in Area 51.
Like the comment that the Republican party conspired to defeat Obamacare in the Senate as a way to embarrass Trump?
Please tone down the talk of conspiracy theories. If you’d like a nice one, though, purely for fun, you can go here. Thanks!
Actually, m
My personal favorite conspiracy theory is that Kpop is controlled by the Illuminati as part of their quest for global domination.
What does “plenty” mean? Is “plenty” enough to elect Donald Trump? Have you personally met these “plenty” of people, or have you seen polls? How do you know this?