A 12-month performance review of the Trump Presidency

(Photos AFP/Imagebank, Flash90)

D

isruptive, but not destructive.

Overall, that’s a fair assessment of Donald Trump’s first year in office.

What has he accomplished?

Let’s first review what he hasn’t accomplished.

He hasn’t blown up the world. Doomsayers had nightmares that a sleepless Trump, plagued with heartburn from his dinner of cheeseburgers and vanilla Häagen-Dazs washed down with liberal quantities of Diet Coke, would push the nuclear button and obliterate the only country whose leader sports a coiffure as unique as his own. It still might happen one day, and Hawaii had a nervous moment over the weekend with a false alarm about a ballistic missile headed its way. But for now, it looks as if the next war between the Koreas will be fought in February on the Olympic battlefield.

Trump hasn’t declared war on Iran, a country that may be in the process of unraveling very neatly on its own, without US military intervention or crippling new sanctions.

Trump hasn’t even sparked a trade war. Despite quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and reopening the NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico, trade with Asian nations has hewed to its steady pace of recent years. Mexico and Canada remain America’s biggest trade partners, after China.

Trump hasn’t remade the Middle East in his own image. He hasn’t trashed the two-state solution, but he promises not to impose one. His Kosel visit and subsequent declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital were greeted by Israeli cheers and Arab whimpers. Middle East exporters keep pumping oil, while the price of gasoline has fallen to a seven-year low in the US.

Trump, the global warming skeptic, hasn’t destroyed the environment. He did announce US withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty and reversed several Obama-era clean air regulations. But the world still rotates on its axis, and ever since Al Gore made it famous, global warming is still the topic du jour on the international cocktail party circuit, even as people’s teeth chatter in the grips of a polar vortex and snowfalls as far south as Florida.

At home, Trump was one for two in his rookie year on linchpin legislation. He won big on tax reform and lost big on health care reform. He only has limited time to push his second-year pet issues — immigration reform and infrastructure investments — because once winter gives way to summer, members of Congress will put legislation on the backburner and devote their energies to keeping themselves in office.

The midterm election is one of the two major disruptors facing the Trump administration as it begins a second year promising to be as turbulent as the first.

Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the Senate and hold just a 21-seat majority in the House of Representatives. The party in power historically loses seats during midterm elections. Most polls indicate the Democrats will, at the very least, substantially close the gap in the House, with an outside shot at winning the Senate.

President Obama and Congress played to a stalemate once the Republicans took control of Congress. If the Democrats capture even one house of the legislature, Trump might as well spend the rest of his presidency playing golf at Mar-a-Lago.

The second major disruptor is Trump himself, and the potential for his presidency to self-destruct. Americans voted him into office to be disruptive, but loose lips can sink ships. A continued barrage of intemperate tweets and abrasive terminology from the White House could one day compel party members to disavow him or declare him unfit for office.

The future is unpredictable, especially in politics, but what we offer in the following pages is an overview of President Trump’s successes and failures in his first year in office in six key areas: changes in the US-Israel relationship and Middle East dynamics; promises kept and broken; achievements and setbacks; unexpected allies and new enemies; and who got richer, who got poorer. —Binyamin Rose

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 694)