Progress Report: Operation Make America Great Again

We’ve all heard the phrase “elections have consequences.”  Last year, voters in the United States of America made it very clear that they were unhappy with the trajectory the country was on by electing Donald Trump the 45^th President of the United States and rejecting a career politician promising more of the same in favor of a political outsider who promised to bring needed change.  In the 2016 Election, Republicans maintained their majorities in both houses of Congress in addition to winning the Presidency, giving them complete control of the Federal government for the first time since 2006.          

 

More than a year after Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination and five months after his inauguration, it is time for an honest progress report.  The Trump Presidency has had its share of successes and failures.  Most of the failures can be attributed to poor planning on the part of Congressional Republicans.  Besides the fact that construction has yet to begin on the much-anticipated border wall with Mexico, the inability to pass a replacement plan for Obama Care is probably the biggest failure of the Trump Presidency so far. Since we have given them the majority in both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, there is little excuse for Republicans not to have coalesced around a replacement plan for Obama Care.  Another big disappointment for conservatives was the spending resolution that was passed at the end of April.    If I was informed of the contents of the budget and had to guess which party crafted it, I would have said it was a Democratic budget.  The budget did not include funding for the border wall, a top priority of President Trump; but it did manage to find money to fund the Democrats’ top priorities including Planned Parenthood, sanctuary cities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  The budget debate will resume at the end of September when the government runs out of money.  Hopefully, Republicans will bring their A game to that debate and pass a budget that lines up closer to President Trump’s America first agenda instead of caving to the Democrats for fear of receiving the blame for a government shutdown.  The failure to instate the temporary travel ban on six Muslim-majority countries identified as national security threats by the Obama Administration is the final disappointment of the Trump administration.  This particular failure is not the President’s fault; he probably did not realize that liberals on the west coast were prepared to take their grievances to activist judges who were all too happy to declare his executive order unconstitutional.  The judges justified their decision by pointing to the President’s statements on the campaign trail advocating for a temporary Muslim ban.  Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse the decisions of the lower courts and recognize that Paragraph (f) of Title 8 § 1182 of the United States Code gives the President the authority to suspend the entry of a group of aliens he feels would be detrimental to the national interest of the United States.                  

 

You might not be aware of most of the successes of the Trump Presidency if you rely solely on the mainstream media for news.  That’s because they rarely bother mentioning them.  When they’re not calling the President a racist, they are questioning his mental health or obsessing over his tweets. The most obvious success of the Trump Administration is the appointment of well-respected originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in his first 100 days despite the Democrats’ best efforts to derail his nomination.  The open seat on the Supreme Court, formerly occupied by the legendary Justice Antonin Scalia, caused many who were on the fence about Trump to cast their ballots for him on Election Day; since they knew that Hillary would have put a liberal judicial activist on the bench if she had gotten elected.  Most of the other successes of the Trump administration can be attributed to executive orders designed to stimulate the economy by reducing regulations and creating American jobs by authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines.  In addition, the Stock Market has been performing quite well since Election Day, indicating excitement for the President’s proposed tax reform package and other pro-growth economic initiatives promised on the campaign trail. 

 

The good news is that the Trump Presidency is still young.  There is still plenty of time for the President to fulfill his ambitious campaign promises that earned him the support of voters that had not supported a Republican presidential candidate in a long time, if ever. There is no doubt that Making America Great Again is going to be an uphill battle; with the powerful deep state, activist judges, and the mainstream media working together to oppose and sabotage this Presidency every step of the way.  But I still believe that President Trump, with the backing of his supporters, has what it takes to ensure that Operation Make America Great Again is a smashing success.