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This Is What a Successful Presidency Looks Like
With the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, it’s worth reflecting on his accomplishments as president. Just the other day I told my colleague Fred Cole that Donald Trump “is a successful conservative Republican president.” That sounds great to those of us who are conservative Republicans; an honest analysis of the past year also shows that it’s a reality.
In a Ricochet post earlier, Fred focused on the failure of Congress to repeal Obamacare or to fund a wall on the border with Mexico as examples of why Trump’s presidency is, in his view, a failure. This is silly, simply put. Those are Congress’s failures, not Trump’s. Fred acknowledges this while trying to brush it aside: “Yes, Congress passes laws, but Presidents set the agenda.” Congress passes laws, period. But John McCain cared more about sticking it to Trump than he did about helping his constituents and other Americans across the country. Despite the failures of Congress, Trump has had many successes. Some he has accomplished through the appropriate use of his executive power alone, and some with legislation passed by Congress that he has signed into law.
Trump not only nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court; he has put more judges in place in his first year in office than any other president in history. Trump’s partnership with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society in selecting judicial nominees is reassuring to conservatives who long for judges to respect the Constitution and the rule of law. If Mitch McConnell had not blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, then Gorsuch would not be on the Supreme Court. However, if Trump had not won the presidency, it would not have mattered.
Trump has done much to restore the balance of powers between the branches of government by unravelling unconstitutional Executive Orders issued by Barack Obama that usurped the authority of Congress. In addition, Trump is reducing the influence of the federal government in everyday Americans’ lives. The EPA is on track to being reduced in personnel size by 50 percent by the end of Trump’s first term. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently announced the end of Common Core. Trump reversed Obama’s last-minute illegal land grab in Utah. He has also directed that for every one new federal regulation, two regulations must be eliminated. As a result, the growth of regulations has been significantly reduced, lifting a weight from the necks of businesses and consumers across the country.
He has allowed the military to do its job. As a result, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis changed the strategy in the fight against ISIS from attrition to annihilation, a sharp contrast to Obama’s complacency. ISIS has been more than decimated. Trump also recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and has begun the process of moving the American embassy. Nikki Haley has been a fierce advocate for America and a defender of Israel at the corrupt and decrepit United Nations. NATO has been strengthened by Trump’s insistence that other member-nations increase their defense spending. Although rogue activist judges in liberal jurisdictions attempted to block Trump’s ability to implement a travel ban, despite his clear constitutional and statutory authority, the Supreme Court eventually overturned the lower-court rulings. Trump’s travel ban went into effect without incident.
Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which cut federal income tax rates and doubled the standard deduction, reducing the federal tax burden for all federal taxpayers. In addition, the tax bill cut the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and included incentives for companies to bring cash back to the United States from overseas. Companies across the country, both large and small, have responded by issuing bonuses to their employees, and Apple has announced it will be bringing $350 billion dollars back to the United States from offshore. It will pay a $38 billion tax bill, give $2,500 bonuses to employees, and plans to further invest $30 billion in the United States, and hire an additional 20,000 employees.
The TCJA also included the repeal of the individual mandate, which will cripple Obamacare and free millions of people from an immoral tax.
As I already mentioned, both economic and environmental regulations are being dismantled. In addition to getting rid of regulations, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, a costly international boondoggle that would not have done one thing for the climate while being a drain on America’s economy.
The TCJA also opened up a small section of the (extremely large) Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. In addition, Trump signed an Executive Order last April instructing Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke to study the expansion of leases for off-shore drilling. Zinke announced at the beginning of January a draft proposal to open up 90 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and gas drilling. By comparison, 94 percent of the OCS is currently off-limits to drilling.
Donald Trump has had a very successful year, and so has America.
It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Max? Almost like morning in America all over again.
Excellent.
Since I posted a link without comment to Fred’s piece, it’s only fair that I do the same to yours.
“All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?”
Thanks @max … you put into words what I was thinking. Well done! MAGA Brother!
Nicely put, thanks for the post!
Brought peace?
And…he is speaking at the March for Life, which means the media will have to pay attention. That’s a good thing.
And…his DOJ stopped harassing police departments and has showed up with a raft of officials to speak at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Also, black unemployment is way down.
I’m a two-issue voter: the well-being of black Americans and the well-being of American police officers. Both have improved under Trump. That’s success.
Those are all real achievements with actual measurable results – look at the stock market. Forgot to mention getting our immigration laws already on the books working again, deporting illegals with criminal and gang records, refusing to keep handing the PA a check while they condone association with terror groups and badmouthing both Israel and the US (for years – not just since Trump), putting Iran and all its arms of terror scattered throughout the world on notice, getting China more involved in NK……we could keep going….I didn’t know about Common Core – are we going back to pre-Common Core?
Max,
Aside from the obvious HRC disaster that was the alternative, let’s look at the record.
Although Obama inherited an economic disaster he did little but open up the sluice gate of cheap money from the Fed. By 2011 the economy had bottomed and was trying to move up. Anything like economic competence would have produced some reasonable growth. For 5 years we didn’t see any. At the beginning of this year, most of the experts simply echoed that 1.5% growth was the new normal. We now know with little else but Trump in the White House (no help from Congress) we can hit 3% growth again. I expect that in 2018 we will see 5% growth. The lowering of the Corporate Tax rate which the Democrats screamed bloody murder about has already in a few weeks started to produce results (Apple).
Obama instituted his absurd foreign policy of leading from behind. This included the appeasement of Iran, North Korea, China, and Putin. His one act of military commitment was Libya. This was a stupid and absurd failure. Kadaffi wasn’t a problem, to begin with. The end result was ever more Jihadism. ISIS, a genocidal Jihadist force, was allowed to flourish while our military rules of engagement tied US military hands behind their back. Trump has allowed our military to destroy ISIS. He has attempted to get France and Germany to carry their weight in NATO. He has reinforced the Balkans, Ukraine and the Eastern states of Europe. He has defended S. Korea and Japan against the direct nuclear extortion of N. Korea and has shown a huge US credible threat for Kim to think about before he continues on his reckless course. He has bolstered the alliance against Iran thereby creating cracks in the Jihadist State as protests again break out.
Trump has done all of this while a White House Press Corps that doesn’t contain a single registered Republican hounds him on a daily basis with the most biased coverage ever of an American President. The MSM media which outnumbers conservative media by a factor of 10:1 continues its endless false accusations and rumor-mongering to undermine the Administration to no avail.
To sum up, I think he’s doing OK.
Regards,
Jim
So was Reagan a failure in the first year of his Presidency for his inability to get rid of the Department of Education? No that is a serious question.
I see more in your views than that.
Pres. Trump’s list of accomplishments this year is too long for me to read the whole thing. I know, I’m lazy. But thank you, Max, for putting all of his accomplishments into one post! Winners love to win; haters love to hate. Let them both do what they do best, and let the chips fall where they may.
I am not yet tired of all the winning.
Also, I am not yet tired of all the media whining. It sounds like winning to me.
Black unemployment is down thanks to the change in administrations. I dream of the day when black Americans realize that their true natural home is the Republican Party. The free market doesn’t know or care what color you are or who your parents were. Conservatism, to succeed, wants there to be as many people as possible with a piece of the pie and skin in the game. Liberalism, to succeed, needs there to be as many people as possible kept down and dependent on government programs just to get through daily life.
Fred’s piece, to my mind, failed because it gave scant mention to counterarguments and didn’t give them the weight and respect they deserved. Unfortunately, this piece suffers from the same problem.
Fred’s piece also failed because he couldn’t help himself but to malign a majority of the GOP voters.
Max maligns no one. He lists only the many counterarguments to the other piece, which screamed out for this conversation.
Winning.
I criticized Fred on those grounds:
That said, I also stand by what I said later:
That said, I can maintain that I took no personal offense.
But there are a majority of GOP voters that could.
Agreed.
Neither seems to take counterarguments seriously: One presents the case as 100% one way, the other as 100% the other way. For my money, @jgolden‘s piece was the most interesting and persuasive of the three and — notably — gave the president pretty good marks.
I believe Max penned his only as a counterbalance to Fred’s.
I agree that @jgolden‘s was interesting and intentionally balanced.
Looking forward to reading Peter’s: Trump: Year One
If Trump wants to keep winning, he has to accept that keeping Republican majorities in the house and senate are his responsibility, and do something about it. I am truly concerned that if the Democrats take the house and senate, “Winning” will consist of cutting deals with the democrats , on the democrats terms.
Yes. It’s not necessary for me to do the NeverTrumper’s job for them. They do just fine cataloguing Trump’s faults (whether real or, more often, imagined).
No one’s suggesting you do so.
Speaking for myself, though, I’m not particularly interested in pieces that only look at either positives or negatives. For me, Fred’s piece failed — among other reasons — because he refused to grapple seriously with any of the president’s accomplishments. Your piece had the same problem, but in the opposite direction.
It was less a corrective than a compounding of the original error. Again, I commend @jgolden for writing a piece that was willing to look at both the president’s accomplishments and his failures.
If the president is genuinely a disaster as Fred claims, then his piece shouldn’t be worried about giving him some credit.
Likewise, if the president is genuinely a success as you claim, then your piece shouldn’t be worried about giving him some criticism. That neither piece was confident enough in its argument to grant the other side any legitimacy says a lot to me.
It was especially galling in this one because I thought the facts were generally on your side.