In fact, none of it has come via legislation. His one and only legislative ‘victory’ was cancelled indefinitely by the Senate.
Not started a Global Thermonuclear War?
I’ve seen this topic play out on reddit a number of times. There are many more Trump supporters over there. One common theme is that Trump has achieved great success in infuriating liberals and that this is an important goal. I don’t know that our local conservatives would think that way (with one or two exceptions) but that seemed to be common sentiment on reddit.
He signed the Russia sanctions bill. Give him that.
Winning! Sad!
He looks tired.
He soundly defeated his arch-enemy Saturday Night Live by getting rid of the Mooch before they could come up with a recurring parody of him. That’s got to count for something!
Only because he forgot he can veto.
If we’re going to try to have a non-combative thread about it, I’ll throw out these:
- Gorsuch (it won’t surprise me if at the end of his term, I still consider this the best thing he’s done)
- liberating Mosul (and soon Raqqa) from ISIS
- handling the Syrian chemical weapons attack with an appropriate response that didn’t trigger a wider war with Russia (nod to AK84)
- rolling back massive National Monuments that gobbled up huge chunks of my state (still in process, but things seem to be progressing on that front)
- stock market is singing along, unemployment is down, and economic growth appears to be accelerating (admittedly, two quarters is a very short time frame to measure these things, but so far, the trends seem positive)
- rolling back Obama-era regulations (see below)
That’s probably only a partial list; as I think of others I’ll mention them too.
You guys should learn about the Congressional Review Act:
NPR: Republicans Are Using An Obscure Law To Repeal Some Obama-Era Regulations
National Review: Trump is quietly succeeding in chipping away at Obama-era regulations.
I think we’re talking about different things. I don’t mean using the tools provided by existing legislation to get things done (though that’s a perfectly legitimate approach). I thought that my original wording made it sound as if I were referring to creating/showing leadership for new laws.
The actions explained in your links accurately sum up what I was attempting to describe.
That it wouldn’t surprise you would not surprise me either.
Did he indeed? Well, that’s certainly a feather in his cap! This guy?
October 23rd, 2016
It might bolster your argument if you could outline the massive changes the he created to allow such a disaster to turn around! Was it simply being elected, was that enough to send ISIS into a tailspin? Did the Iraqi troops have a yuge upturn in morale and capability when the glad news was shared?
I wait with bated breath.
I don’t even…what?..huh?
So, first you admit that these things don’t mean much of anything, but then try to imply that, yeah, they really do. Maybe.
Regulations bad, m’kay? Excuse me, but says who? So far, it seems that muffling if not dismantling the EPA seems to be the point of the spear. Heaven forfend that our nation’s businesses would not have access to our God-given toxic waste disposal sites, aka rivers. Or that we surrender in our struggle against competing species, i.e., honeybees.
Upon reflection, that can’t be all of it, there must be something in there to loosen the stranglehold that union thugs have on business. My bad.
You don’t seem interested in adhering to the allegedly non-combative nature of this thread, so this will probably be my final reply to you here:
Now that ISIS is confined to a much smaller area.
This is how much territory ISIS has lost in 2 years
This rule seems to apply to every single thing Congress might pass. If proposing X and getting Congress to pass X is not fairly called a Presidential accomplishment, then I think no President can point to many successes.
And coincidentally, my answer: Gorsuch, and some cabinet appointees. Really, I cannot recall a single President who’s done LESS six months into his term.
Historically, putting the enemy in a situation where they can choose between death and death is a sure way to bolster the intensity of their resistance. Très duh, mais non? And, it wasn’t our guys who were going house to house for a thousand separate firefights, it was the Iraqi soldiers.
Did we offer thousands of our own to take their fair share of the hand-to-hand fighting? With fanatical resistance guaranteed? I hazard a guess, that would not have gone over big league with our own people, as the casualty lists swell and burst like a corpse in the burning sun of the Godforsaken Desert. YMMV.
Apparently Trump’s hissy fit over Boeing charging too much for a new airforce1 motivated someone to find a cheaper alternative: Air Force Finds Cheap 747s That Were Owned by Russian Airline for Air Force One
I haven’t seen a tweet about it, but I’m sure he’ll take credit when he notices.
Trump could have locked himself in Trump Tower and never uttered a word or signed a thing and the stock market would still be singing, unemployment would still be down and the economy would still be growing. He inherited quite a robust economy from Obama, you know. Job growth for a record number of months in a row. I could have kept that streak running. All Trump had to do was to not fuck that up. And now he’s taking all the credit for it, per typical.
The stupid part is that the cost of 2 AF1s is about 774 million (in the link) the rest of the 4 billion+ is the insane amount of retrofitting and additional equipment to make it a Presidential plane.
So the cost of the original planes is about 20% of the total cost. So even a discounted pair isn’t really saving much.
Boy, talk about people viewing questions through their own lens.
Trump is now in charge, so he should get whatever credit or blame on how the fight against ISIS is going right now. But to be clear, there was no recognizable change in the U.S. strategy against ISIS until May 19th, so I think it’s fair to point out that it seems like Obama’s military strategy against ISIS has been more or less in place from the summer of 2014, when everything went to hell, to roughly May or so of this year. And the battle for Mosul began in November 2016 and appears to be mostly over as of July 2017, so I’m not so sure if anything at all changed in the last few months in terms of U.S. policy that resulted in Mosul being wrested from ISIS – but at the very least Trump can claim credit for seeing things through.
And on the Air Force One replacement, yes, it will probably cost $4 billion or so when it is all said and done, but Trump did put his foot down and it is fair to claim he cut something like a couple hundred million out of the program. He should get credit for that, as opposed to his claiming credit for taking $700 million out of the F-35 program, which were savings that had been planned for years.