milfchaser said: dziga said: milfchaser said: zeebop said: Montanasucker said: Apparently so. He is the only politician I can ever remember actually following through on their campaign promises.
He has taught us a good lesson to not elect politicians as President, but to elect businessmen.
Trump said Mexico would pay for his Wall. He also told Bob Woodward he could pay off the national debt in eight years. How are those promises coming along?
Do any of them ever complete their promises?
Trump said he would improve things in the VA and did. He said he'd renegotiate NAFTA and did. He said he'd get ISIS out of Iraq and did. He said he'd get us out of the Paris Accords and did. He said he wouldn't sign onto the TPP and followed through on that one also.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but whether you like his promises or not, he has followed through on several of them -- including the unemployment situation, which I think most people can agree is a positive, although it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly which program or policy, by which President, has caused the improvement.
Don't take any of it at face value.
Examples:
https://www.propublica.org/series/inside-trump-vaIsis was being rolled up already in 2016.
The renegotiated NAFTA hasn't been passed and it has been far from a universally praised renegotiation with clear benefit for the US and certainly is built on the exact same framework.
https://www.livingstonintl.com/nafta/The promises I feel Trump has fully kept: Conservative justices. Cracking down on immigration. Engaging in the culture wars.
For the economic side I truly think it is nonsense. All that has happened is that the trend lines from the second year of Obama's first term has continued. I would frankly argue that his plan actually failed as deficits are hugely spiking without any lasting change in the trend lines. I suggest looking at the 10 year GDP chart on this page:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growthAnd unemployment graph:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024One thing that doesn't get mentioned much in economic reporting is that GDP estimates are almost revised downwards from their first reporting. There have only been 2-4 quarters (depending upon whose numbers you use) under Trump that topped 3% growth. GDP rise has gone up perhaps .5% from the trend lines (perhaps because longer term data is needed) in exchange for deficits that are close to a trillion dollars again. The tax cuts went into stock buybacks, not capital investment...just like every sane economist predicted. It was another completely unbalanced (skewed towards the wealthy) short term boost tax cut rather than long term investment.
I understand why Trump supporters would feel validated, but he has not governed on the populist messages he ran on unless one wants to argue (and perhaps it is a valid argument) that the culture wars stuff is based upon populism.
I'm sure there are still issues in the VA. Here's how NPR covered the bill Trump signed in June 2017:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/23/545617174/fact-checking-trump-on-veteran-affairsAnd it doesn't take back the fact that Trump said he would push for reforms in the VA, and followed through.
As for the unemployment numbers I mentioned, I always use the real unemployment statistics from the BLS, which refer to the actual number of people employed in the country.
As for NAFTA, it was was negotiated and signed by leaders of all three countries. The quality of the result has little to do with the fact that Trump followed through on the promise to renegotiate.
RE: ISIS: yes, Obama finally did something after ISIS took over half of Iraq and Syria. However, Trump said he would finish the job of clearing them from Iraq and he did.
And my last two points, the TPP and Paris Accords, still stand. Trump said he'd pull us out and he pulled us out. Regardless of how one may feel about the US pulling out of these agreements, they were promises that were followed, as was Trump's promise to dump the JCPOA with Iran.
There are also other, regulatory promises Trump kept, many of which are unpopular with Democrats and centrists.
Obviously, his promises concerning the Wall and replacing Obamacare have not been kept. The 'Art of the Deal' on those issues so far has failed abysmally.
I agree on your last point. The tax cuts didn't really do all that much for the middle class.
I think, overall, my point was simply there is a lot of hype about what changed compared to what has actually changed. The big ticket items aren't drastic changes. ISIS/Iraq, jobs and the economy, NAFTA...what happened are not wholesale changes. To really see the changes you have to look at what you brought up and I didn't: regulatory stuff which has a lot to do with personnel running agencies than anything else. "Personnel is policy" sort of thing. The regulatory rollbacks have been pretty stark and the conservative stacking of the judicial branch makes it likely that not only do those rollbacks stick but future attempts to change things will be stopped by the courts.
The weird thing for me is that there isn't really a consistency to it. Pretty much all of it is the Koch Brother's and the 1%'s wet dream; all that isn't is the immigration and tariff stuff. I really think that Bannon was the guy who had the populist vision and if Trump had stuck to it instead of just going back to the standard 1% policies of the GOP he would probably have been over 50% approval most of his term even despite his obnoxious personal bearing.
So what was the promise? Is it individual promises or were the promises about derigging the political and economic systems for "the forgotten American?" The fact that some of the promises were kept technically even though the changes made to keep those promises go against the entire theme of his populist campaign strikes me as more of a lie than of a promise kept. I can't see any way to argue that he hasn't governed for the plutocrats more consistently than any President since Herbert Hoover except for a couple of splashy examples of crude populist culture war distractions.
Frankly, even though perhaps many do, I don't see the "wall" or healthcare as breaking of promises. The wall was always going to go up against structural issues and the issue of Mexico paying for it was never anything that anyone took seriously. The same goes for healthcare which is way too complex for a President to just change; so much so that even with GOP majorities they couldn't get them done.
I see the same thing with Obama. He campaigned as quite the progressive, with Hope and Change. Then he governed in a standard 3rd Way Democrat model. He may have ticked off some of his individual boxes, but the overall tenor of his governance did not match up to the more populist themes he ran upon.
The elite own and run America, plain and simple. The only serious challenge I still see to them right now is Sanders and who knows what will happen with all of that.
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