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 45th 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.
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