OPINION: A recap of Mr. Trump’s presidency

The end of Mr. Trump’s presidency is a good time to review the policy landscape of the past four years. As with any president, there are successes and failures as measured against his own standards of success. The rest of us might offer judgements as well. In the case of our 45th president, I am tempted to call this the good, the bad and the ugly. I review them in order.

First, the good. Mr. Trump’s successes include sweeping removal of many of Mr. Obama’s executive orders, and regulatory expansion. Regardless of your feelings about the wisdom of any of these orders, Mr. Trump demonstrated the fleeting nature of non-legislative policy maneuvers. Of course, these are likely to disappear in the coming weeks as well.

Mr. Trump successfully attacked ISIS, and dismantled a deeply flawed Iranian nuclear deal. He also attacked individual Iranian terrorists, sending a stark message to that regime. His policies led to a modest improvement of relations between nations in the Middle East who fear the spread of Iranian terror.

His domestic economic policy successes were limited to tax reform that brought our corporate taxes in-line with other developed nations and reduced loopholes. He made individual income taxes more progressive, and reduced the compliance burden on millions of families. Some of this will remain very popular, and I commented favorably on that policy in this column.

These successes are tempered by lack of follow up. Mr. Trump did little with Congress, so faces the same erasure of his executive orders that faced Mr. Obama. In confronting Iran, he weakened NATO, and offered no follow-up to Iran’s violence that would bring to bear a coalition outside the Middle East. He failed to reduce spending or confront any major spending program during the longest economic recovery in history. In short, a lack of vision and discipline meant that his policy victories are written in sand.

Now the bad. Mr. Trump failed to “build a wall” on our southern border, and that which he did complete was paid for by American taxpayers. That was an ineffective plan, so we are lucky he failed, but it also set back an important immigration debate. His predecessors will find it more difficult to reach an immigration compromise because of Mr. Trump, and for that we are all worse off.

He launched a trade war that empowered China, raised taxes on Americans and significantly damaged our manufacturing economy long before anyone heard of COVID. Today, we have fewer factory jobs than when Mr. Trump took office, and a larger trade deficit with China. I think these are bad standards to judge a president by, but these are his own standards. According to them, he failed badly.

After four years we have fewer jobs, more inequality and more modest stock market expansion than when he entered office. Mr. Trump added to the federal rate at nearly twice the speed of any democratic president in 50 years. Even without COVID, Mr. Trump would’ve racked up the largest federal debt during an economic recovery in U.S. history. But, there was COVID, which falls squarely into the ugly part of his presidency.

COVID will kill well over half a million Americans before we are fully immunized to this round of it. No American president could have prevented a large mortality event. But, if the U.S. response had been as effective as the next worst country, we’d have fewer than half the number of deaths as we have experienced. That is Mr. Trump’s doing. He purposefully downplayed the risk of COVID to protect his re-election campaign. He fostered the politicization of simple public health measures and failed to provide test kits, and now it appears, vaccines. He intentionally failed the basic duties of his office.

Mr. Trump’s willful lies and negligence helped fuel the spread of the disease and kill somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 Americans. This came on the tail of an impeachment that should have seen him removed from office for abuse of power.

The final piece of ugliness was the most brazen assault upon our constitutional order by a sitting president in our history. For more than two months, the president carefully crafted not only a lie, but a vast untruth surrounding election fraud. He spread this false narrative—the most perfect example of propaganda in American history—to tens of millions of his supporters. He personally created the ecosystem for a constitutional crisis. He then unleashed a physical assault upon our Congress to obstruct the Constitution.

Four years ago, I wrote a hopeful column describing potential policy achievements of a Trump presidency. Today must be a bitter moment for conservatives hoping his would be a transformational presidency. Instead, conservatives find themselves in disarray, and chained to insurrectionists. Ultimately, his few policy achievements are a mirage, undone by his many flaws. In the end, Mr. Trump’s most lasting legacy will be the importance of character, in this the lack thereof, in public service.

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