He has broken his promise to never take a vacation or enjoy golf. His plan to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure has become a running punchline and he dropped his threat to throw Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl out of a plane without a parachute. But behind the drama, chaos and tumult that has defined President Trump’s administration, the president has fulfilled a wide range of promises he made during his 2016 campaign.
It’s a theme that will play a major role in the upcoming Republican National Convention, as the president tries to convince a weary nation that he deserves a second term, even though millions of Americans are infected with the coronavirus, the economy is in. taters and racial tensions boil over.
‘I’m the only candidate who gave you more than I promised in the campaign. It’s true. “I’m the only one, maybe ever,” Trump said at a rally in the Arizona battle last week.
In 2016, Trump was criticized for lacking detailed policies similar to those of his rival, Hillary Clinton. What Trump did was impose a vision for a new America – one driven by a nationalist self-interest and disregard for Democratic norms.
In the years since, Trump has acted on that vision, made amends with his nativist immigration rhetoric, restored corporate governance, and transformed America’s role in the world by abandoning multilateral agreements and forging dozens of old alliances. heinen, cheered by many of his most loyal supporters and generating great alarm among his critics.
But will that matter if more than 175,000 Americans have died and more than 5.5 million have been infected by a virus that has hit the U.S. much harder than other industrialized countries?
“I think the golden egg of Trump’s re-election campaign will be keeping promises, such as getting two Supreme Court justices in power and keeping America out of foreign wars like Afghanistan and Iraq,” Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian, said. and Rice University. “The problem he has is that his COVID response did not go to the polls in 2016 and that he received bad signs about how he handled the pandemic. That is a wrinkle in his promises that hold conversation points. “
Grif has been Trump’s biggest impact on immigration.
Although Mexico has never paid for the ‘big, beautiful wall’ Trump promised to build along the 2,000-mile southern border – the signature of his 2016 campaign – the project is now underway, with 450 miles of it. t expected to be completed by the end of December. (Only a sliver of that, however, has been built along areas where no barrier stood before.) And Trump has managed to fundamentally transform the nation’s immigration system, despite opposition from the courts and not much cooperation from Congress.
By using more than 400 executive actions, Trump has, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, effectively shut down the asylum system on the southwestern border and allowed flight. At the same time, Trump has imposed many new restrictions on legal immigration, with the pandemic spurring many more tracks. With so few visas being processed and immigration records being collected, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have barely any money left and are about to conquer large areas of its workforce.
Some specific promises about immigration went unfulfilled: Trump failed to create a new ‘deportation force’, and never fulfilled his promise to deport millions, did not end funding for sanctuaries that do not cooperate with immigration authorities and do not move to end the constitutional right to civil citizenship. But he insisted on “capturing and releasing” immigrants into the country illegally, improving background screening of migrants and moving to stop immigration from an army of majority Muslims – an evolution of the Muslim ban he pursued during his campaign.
‘They have really used the tools that the executive branch on immigration has in their entirety. And they are successful, ‘said Doris Meissner, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program and a former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner. “And you know, in a lot of ways, remarkably so, because there’s been very strong opposition.”
In other areas, Trump’s record is more mixed. When it comes to health care, Republicans in Congress repealed the individual mandate of the Obama era that forced people to buy health insurance, but he failed to replace the Affordable Care Act with an alternative, despite frequent promises to present his own plan.
On the economy, Trump and congressional Republicans pushed for a pledge tax increase early in his term that dramatically reduced the corporate tax rate – as he had promised – and doubled the tax threshold, but did not eliminate it. He also did not live up to his promise to reduce the number of individual income tax brackets from seven to three to simplify the tax code, and efforts to support production tasks began to stop by his third year in office.
Trump had promised to boost average economic growth to 3.5% per year. But he has never grown 3% in one year and the progress on reducing unemployment has been ruined by the pandemic, which has been in the worst recession since the Great Depression began.
Some of Trump’s more controversial promises have been dropped along the way, such as his promise to eliminate gun-free zones at schools and military bases and establish a national right to carry concealed weapons that would be subject to local restrictions. He only ignored the spiraling costs of college education and the plans he had proposed to make student loan repayment affordable. He never complied with his duty to push for a constitutional amendment to set thermal limits for members of Congress. And its promise to launch a massive $ 1 trillion effort to build the nation’s infrastructure, including airports, roads and bridges, has become a running punchline.
He also quickly abandoned his promise to never take a vacation as president, and he often made trips to his properties in Florida and New Jersey. And while he claimed he would only play golf with those who would help him govern and never with friends, he has now paid more than 270 visits to golf clubs since his inauguration, according to a website dedicated to tracking his visits. He is often photographed playing with pros.
But he delivered on other fronts. He immediately took a federal tenancy, as he had promised, and stated that for every new federal regulation that was introduced, two would be eliminated. He launched an aggressive campaign to roll back environmental protection, led by the Obama administration, including those that protect waterways, encourage cleaner energy, reduce car emissions and restrict offshore drilling and oil exploration on federal land. At the same time, he has prioritized tapping on the country’s shale oil, and natural gas and coal reserves.
Courts, however, evade many of Trump’s environmental rollbacks, calling them ill-reasoned and illegal.
In trade, Trump recognized the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but failed to reduce the imbalance in the US-China while starting a trade war with the country.
On the international front, the impact has been enormous, as he has put his “America First” policy into practice, fundamentally redefining America’s place in the world. He increased funding for the military, participated in the race to arm space, only refused efforts to curb nuclear proliferation, and threatened U.S. membership in 20th-century landmark alliances, including NATO.
At the same time, he dragged the US from participating in a host of landmark agreements, including the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal (although he failed to bring Iran back to the negotiating table to broker a replacement deal, as he promised .) On international summits, he has cozied up to authoritarian leaders, including Russian Vladimir Putin, while fighting with longtime allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada.
In a sign of just how far he has broken from the world community, he stopped the World Health Organization earlier this year in the midst of the pandemic.
Jeremy Shapiro, a non-recent senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Trump has changed US foreign policy in ways that go beyond what he outlined before taking office.
‘I do not think he really prepares people for the degree of revolution. He did not say ‘I do not like human rights’ on the campaign track. He did not say, ‘I do not like democracy.’ He did not say, ‘I do not like alliances,’ ‘Shapiro said.
While Trump has complained that the U.S. has gotten a rough deal in so many areas, he has failed, Shapiro claimed, to negotiate improvements, except perhaps the new NAFTA.
‘It’s easy to destroy a deal. It’s much harder to make a better one. And he did not do that, ‘said Shapiro.
