The Trump Disruption His policy record is better than he and his opponents have made it sound.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-disruption-11598570719?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
When Donald Trump won the Presidency four years ago, half of America gnashed its teeth or cried and even supporters who cheered weren’t sure what to expect. Four years later our verdict is that he has been better on policy than we feared but worse on personal behavior than we hoped. Whether Americans re-elect him depends on how they assess that political balance sheet.
We realize that even considering the Trump Presidency in these conventional terms is offensive to some readers. Don’t we get that he’s a would-be authoritarian, a Russian plant, or at least so deeply flawed as a human being that he can’t be trusted with power? Yet our democracy survives, and the Constitution’s checks and balances are intact. Americans who heard him ask for a second term Thursday night were trying to make sense of what has been a raucous and disruptive Presidency.**
This week’s virtual GOP convention has spent hours educating voters about Trump Administration successes, and many are real, starting with the pre-Covid-19 economy that we examined this week. The political irony is that this success was due to Mr. Trump’s adoption of conventional GOP economics, not his trade or immigration agenda.
The President contracted out tax reform to Congress, especially Paul Ryan in the House and Pat Toomey in the Senate, and they delivered. Mr. Trump also hired a cast of deregulators who liberated the economy from burdens on energy and more. The economy kicked into higher gear, and the resulting tight labor market produced strong wage gains for lower-skilled workers left behind by the Obama-Biden years. Note that this happened without the income redistribution schemes favored on the left and increasingly the right.
Mr. Trump’s tariff onslaught in 2018 hurt what was a boom in new manufacturing jobs as supply chains were upset, input costs rose, and uncertainly increased. But he has avoided the full-scale trade war we feared. His battles with China achieved less than advertised with tariffs, but more on Huawei and attention to Chinese cyber and IP theft.
Mr. Trump is also the first President since Ronald Reagan to try to rein in the administrative state. This can seem like an abstraction but it has real consequences in people’s lives. Betsy DeVos’s repeal of Joe Biden’s “guidance” for handling sexual assault cases on campus will spare many young people from unfair ruin. The repeal of the Waters of the U.S. rule will spare farmers and property owners from bureaucratic harassment.
These policies are more likely to be sustained by the more than 200 conservative judges Mr. Trump has appointed. These judges are more attentive to the abuses of the regulatory state, harm to the separation of powers, and limits on religious liberty. The latter explains the enduring support for Mr. Trump from evangelicals and church-going Catholics.
Mr. Trump failed to repeal ObamaCare and has now defaulted to promoting drug price controls that would limit the development of new cures. He also failed on what could have been a landmark immigration reform, trading some legalization for more border security. His televised naturalization service this week clashes with his often harsh limits on even legal immigration.
Foreign policy was one of our biggest fears, and his record is mixed. His disdain for convention led him to useful decisions that no other GOP President would have made—withdrawing from the Potemkin Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal, and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. That latter two have contributed to a breakthrough in Arab-Israeli relations that eluded the last five Presidents.
Yet his bullying and impulsiveness have needlessly soured relations with allies, especially Germany, and raised doubts about U.S. commitments. Most offensive is his personal courtship of dictators, such as Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and for a while Xi Jinping. He seems to think he can charm these hard men, and he has little to show for his pursuit.
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Which brings us to character. Americans knew when they voted for Mr. Trump that he wouldn’t adhere to convention, but they also hoped his manners would rise to the respect due the office. They too often haven’t. He is needlessly polarizing, luxuriates in petty feuds, and trashes aides who served him well as they walk out the door. He seems not to care if what he says is true, which has squandered his ability to persuade in a crisis.
He often hurts himself by crashing through proper norms as with his near-invitation of the Taliban to Camp David and his threat to withhold aid if Ukraine didn’t investigate Joe Biden. Both were stopped by advisers, but the latter got him impeached.
His narcissism is his own worst enemy, which the public has seen to its worst effect in the pandemic. Mr. Trump brawled with governors and the press and bragged relentlessly about his success when Americans wanted candid realism. His Administration’s anti-Covid record is better than Mr. Trump has made it sound.
Yet it’s impossible to assess Mr. Trump’s behavior outside the context of the often unhinged opposition. We will never know how his Presidency might have gone without the Russia collusion accusations. But we do know the FBI, and the Obama Administration, knew early on that there was no evidence for the claims. They nonetheless fed the media stories to cripple him.
Before Election Day in 2016, we wrote that the biggest gamble of a Trump Presidency wasn’t the fantasy that he was a Mussolini from Manhattan. It was that he’d face a hostile press and bureaucracy that his inexperience and erratic management would be unable to navigate. So it has often been, and in 2018 the resulting tumult cost Republicans control of the House.
Americans now know Mr. Trump isn’t going to change, but then he isn’t running only against himself. He has a chance to win another four years if voters conclude that his disruption is less risky than the Biden-Sanders Democratic agenda.
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