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Did Trump Keep His Campaign Promises?
When assessing the quality of a candidate, history can be a useful guide. Not only the history of the particular candidate, but the history of previous successful candidates. So when looking at all of the candidates for the Republican nomination – not just Trump – it is useful to look at whether President Trump kept candidate Trump’s campaign promises, and if not, why not.
But which promises? It is in the nature of candidates for office – especially perhaps underdogs – to promise all sorts of things. And, unlike tightly-scripted campaigns of the ‘pros’, Trump just said so much. So my methodology is this: what did Trump promise in order to gain the Republican nomination? And, in particular, what did his ideological enemies say he promised, at the time? This should keep the focus on what type of Republican Trump promised to be, should avoid hindsight, and should be neutral between pro- and anti-Trump Republicans.
So here is a list of 10 promises Trump made to gain the 2016 nomination, according to Politifact (in July 2016).
1 ‘Build a wall’ — and make Mexico pay for it
I’m going to put this down as a Fail. And it was a fail because President Trump couldn’t get his own party to support him on his signature, and signally popular, policy.
2 Temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States
I’m going to put this down as a Fail. But I’m going to say it was because of unprecedented political action taken by the federal judiciary, backed up at crucial times by typical Roberts’ court pusillanimity. (I know there was ‘learned’ commentary here, as elsewhere, from folks who had never read, let alone written, an Executive Order, that the decisions staying the action for ‘racism’ were perfectly foreseeable. I still think this is nonsense.)
3 ‘Bring manufacturing (jobs) back’
Kept.
4 Impose tariffs on goods made in China and Mexico
Kept.
5 Renegotiate or withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership
Kept.
6 ‘Full repeal of Obamacare’ and replace it with a market-based alternative
Fail. Again because he couldn’t make his own party keep the promises they had been making year after year.
7 Renegotiate the Iran deal
I’m going to put this down as ‘Kept’ in spirit.
8 Leave Social Security as is
Kept.
9 Cut taxes
Kept.
10 ‘Bomb’ and/or ‘take the oil’ from ISIS
Again, I’m going to put this down as ‘Kept’.
(Now, you may think some of these Kept promises were the wrong things to do, and on some I wouldn’t argue. But this is about whether a candidate followed through.)
What can we learn from this list?
- By and large, President Trump kept the campaign promises he made to gain the Republican nomination.
- In one case (the temporary ban on travel from countries with unsatisfactory traveler vetting procedures) he was stymied by the willingness of his ideological enemies to abandon the rule of law, and of the unwillingness of a goodly proportion of his ideological friends to call this out.
- In one case (Obamacare) I think the blame must firmly sit with the Republican Party – Trump and non-Trump – as a whole. They showed that their opposition to the most incoherent medical funding system in the known universe was, at core, more about fundraising than about improving people’s lives.
- In the final case (the Wall), it is incontrovertible that Trump was taken for a ride by Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus, together with a whole host of folks he credulously appointed on the advice of the Republican apparatus.
- Therefore, any candidate wanting to keep promises popular with conservative/grass-roots voters must square the circle of (a) NEVER appointing (or, at least, trusting) anyone with any sort of positive reputation in Washington (or political circles generally), while (b) convincing enough legislators to depart from their normal practices and actually pass legislation that supports such promises.
- Similarly, any CANDIDATE with a political track record (which is usually all of them) should be facing a strong presumption that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. This presumption can be rebutted, but not by hiring the usual political consultants, appointing the usual campaign chairpeople, and making the usual rhetorical moves.
And that was fed by the dot-com boom, peaking in the middle of 2000, followed by a recession in the dot-bomb bust in the second half of the year, where the NASDAQ lost half its peak value.
This is a good short critique. We don’t really know how well he would have done if he had the benefit of advisors who were generally on the same page as him, MAGA. Trump may not have a natural inclination for small federal government but the right advisors may have been able to show him the defects in the big central planning covering everything. I suspect he sees how this works now
It might be that the things that were done to President Trump by malicious actors within and without his administration were necessary for the general revealing of what had happened to America that brought forth his election. And now look how much more of evil has been shoved down our throats by Biden and his progressive puppet handlers.
I know those same people will do everything they can to see that Trump does not get another shot but he may surprise them.
The cynical part of you is not wondering. The ( insufficiently) cynical part of you KNOWS that this is likely .😎
When you take the time to look into publicly held debt (which went down for i think 3 years of Clinton Admin), intra-governmental holdings (which went up in excess to how much public debt went down in each of those three years) which together make up the national debt (which went up each and every year since – as @miffedwhitemale stated – Eisenhower.
@genferei is correct in how the argument is usually present to the public – when one only looks at the publicly held debt – but that is only half of what is added together to produce the true “surplus” or “deficit” to the total national debt. The elusive “intra-government holdings” were always in excess to the savings made in the publicly held debt. Intra-Government holdings are created by selling securities and buying bonds from the monies brought in from the various trust funds the US has – things like Social Security, civil service retirement fund, unemployment trust fund, military, civil service, etc.
The margins were tightening and it *can* be done, but those magical years in the late Clinton Presidency just saw the deficits increasing because instead of taking it the pubic debt bucket, it was instead taken from the intra-governmental holdings bucket. Net increase in the National Debt every year.
Yes, someone else made that observation in this thread – the revealing of bad actors within the Party itself was one of the greatest accomplishments by his administration.
There was less than 50 miles of new wall built. Honest question. Even if we had a wall from Pacific to the Gulf, would it stop today’s illegal migration? People are gaming our system by claiming asylum when they arrive. How would a wall stop this? 40% of illegal immigrants are visa overstays. how does a wall address that? I’d say almost all of us here are opposed to illegal immigration from anywhere. Why the relentless focus on a solution that doesn’t stop the problem? Until laws and judicial decisions are changed, there will be easy access to the United States.
that was also driven by Republicans in congress in the 90s back when we cared about such things.
3 ‘Bring manufacturing (jobs) back’
Kept.
You sure? Do you know how many manufacturing jobs were added between Jan 2017 and 2021?
It was actually, McCain, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski who voted against the repeal of Obamacare. I find it simplistic and unfair whenever I hear somebody blaming the entire GOP for the failure to repeal Obamacare, when it was specifically three people. The entire rest of the GOP voted for it.
Depends on how you define “new”. But replacing broken wall sections, or previously existing wall sections, makes a lot of sense as that’s probably where much of the current traffic is. And that’s really the issue; where is the traffic happening?
Separate problem.
The Dems understand that there’s a difference between the law, and selective enforcement of the law. And selective enforcement is far, far more politically powerful. And it is open to all sorts of juicy opportunities for bribery, graft, mismanagement, fraud, waste, and so forth.
No changes to the laws are going to address that. It’s how the department is managed in practice.
What’s needed is a built-in *mechanism* that incentivizes the right thing and punishes the wrong thing. We don’t have that now.
Is this one really true? I am not challenging it because I don’t know the actual stats, but people on this site have been bemoaning the fact that our manufacturing base has never returned. I am also aware that our manufacturing production is sky-high compared to the 20th century because machines have taken over so many formerly manual jobs.
My own take on this one is that it failed because Trump waited two years to promote building The Wall, by which time he had lost Congress to the democrats. They certainly weren’t going to help him.
But Trump’s spending made those guys out to look like pikers.
I don’t buy that as an excuse for any of their broken promises on balancing the budget. They were all blowing smoke.
It is still a fail if everybody fails. In fact is is a more important fail because everybody has failed so far and nobody, except for Clinton’s speed bump, has been there to restore fiscal sanity.
You might add “taking care of the ISIS threat.” He helped to militarily mow down ISIS after Obama treated them with kid gloves for eight years. That one doesn’t get much coverage in the U.S., even among conservatives.
I’m glad you pointed that out! I’ve read the details on this a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly, but it was something like – the Clinton administration was close to, but not actually achieving balancing the budget, so they borrowed money from the Social Security account or some such thing to make up the shortfall, then “claiming” that they had balanced the budget. And you are right – the litmus test for this is to look up the Federal Debt increase year by year. You’ll discover that the National Debt did go up a little bit in the year Clinton claims to have balanced the budget.
That’s why I proved the link to the data.
I regret that I have but one like to give to this comment.
Can you name a President that has reduced the debt? That woukd he Clinton in the late 90s. The pattern has been to double the debt every 8 years since then. Before Clinton we have to go back to the 60s to see such behavior. Your sainted Regan didn’t do it. No person that you voted for as President has reduced the debt.
Go back and re-read the comments, specifically #29. Clinton didn’t do it.
And you’d have to go back to the 50s and Eisenhower.
In other words, Trump was just as bad or worse than any of them.
This is true, and there are a number of Republicans in Congress who should pay for this among other things starting with McConnell.
He is the last President to run a surplus for a given FY. I suppose technically he didn’t reduce the debt depending on the measure that one uses to define “reduce the debt”. Do you mean over a term? Over a time in office? Over a Fiscal Year? Do you count a surplus as a debt reduction, when the interest on the debt may exceed the surplus?
He did NOT run a surplus. A surplus would have reduced the debt. The debt never went down during Clinton’s term. The data is right there.
Whatever it was, Clinton didn’t do it. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher did it (Maggie by providing some missing backbone for George H.W. Bush.) They provided the peace dividend, and Bill Clinton spent it.
On that, I totally agree. The two main drivers of the surplus were the massive reduction in Defense spending and the counting of SS taxes as income.
Just make it extra clear, here are the numbers from the treasury.gov website. [link is in comment 29]. I overlapped into the last few years of Bush 1 and the first few years of Bush 2 for completeness.
Heading for the second column is “debt outstanding amount”. And here’s the definition of the term: “The Total Debt Outstanding represents the face amount or principal amount of marketable and non-marketable securities currently outstanding. Total debt outstanding is expressed as of fiscal year end.”
Show me where it went down from one year to the next.
Edit: Don’t those numbers look cute now?
Leave Paris climate agreement- Kept!
This is the official record of the budget. Section 1 is Total, Section 2 is On Budget, and Section 3 is Off Budget
Columns in each section are Receipts, Outlays, and Surplus or Deficit. 98 had a modest surplus of $69B, $126B in 99, and then $236B in 2000 (the peak). All from BUDGET-2016-TAB.pdf (govinfo.gov)
The problem is that when we talk debt two numbers matter. Marketable Debt and Non-Marketable Debt. This isn’t my area of expertise, but as I understand it Marketable Debt is the debt people purchase as securities and T-bills. Non-Marketable debt is intergovernmental debt (I think). At any rate, since non-marketable debt is money that the government is loaning itself, it isn’t usually affected by a surplus.
If you can decipher this…more power to you.
Here is a balance sheet for the US from the Treasury dept (Monthly Statement of the Public Debt (MSPD) | U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data) that shows us that Marketable debt declined from 1999 to 2000 by the budget surplus ($240B), but that the gov’t borrowed more money from itself to the tune of just over $215B and then added another $43B in non-interest bearing debt (whatever that is). So, they reduced one category by $240B but increase the other categories by $255B. So, did the debt decrease? It depends on how one counts it. In a way it did, but in a way it didn’t. Did they inflate the budget surplus to look good by doing more non-marketable debt? Maybe. The entire thing is a mess and almost impossible to decipher. In true Clintonian fashion, it all depends on what your definition of is, is.