The most shocking part of Donald Trump’s first year
He might be on track to win a second term
AND still it goes on, the rumbustious pantomime of insult and egotism that first rolled into the White House one year ago, when businessman and reality television star Donald Trump found himself inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. Many will find it fitting that the very weekend Trump celebrates his first anniversary in Washington, American government itself has ground to a halt amid an acrimonious budget stand-off. .
No doubt the ‘very stable genius’ will take the opportunity to lash out once again at those who oppose him.
Doubtless, too, his several million critics will rejoin battle with a man whose reputation is mired in allegations of collusion with a foreign power – a ‘p **** -grabbing’, pottymouthed leader of the Free World who denounced Mexicans as rapists, and is said to have dismissed a range of poverty-stricken nations as ‘s***holes’. A vain egotist who has pushed the planet to the brink of nuclear conflagration.
Yet for all that we decry Trump as an oaf who should never have stood for office with such nugatory credentials – and it is true I described him as a clown before the election – here is the real surprise: he has not been the disaster many predicted. Indeed he has (whisper it quietly) made rather a success of it.
Compared to Obama’s last years in office, President Trump made a number of important gains which would categorically not have been achieved by his predecessor.
Take the $1.5trillion tax cut, for example. It has already persuaded Apple to repatriate hundreds of billions to the US and pay a $38billion tax bill, opening the prospect of other American companies unleashing an avalanche of money hitherto kept overseas into the US economy.
Trump’s choices – after several bad mis-steps – for his top officials has now produced an excellent team in the White House, Pentagon and elsewhere.
General James Mattis was always going to be a giant in the Defense Department, but General John F. Kelly as Chief of Staff and Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary are also significantly superior to Obama’s lacklustre team.
Trump’s overturning of Obama’s threat to put a post-Brexit Britain ‘at the back of the queue’ in future trade deals was welcome, as was his decision finally to recognise the reality of where the Israeli government has geographically been for decades, and move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. He did that in the face of threats of a revolt across the Middle East that has completely failed to materialise.
Moreover, the military onslaught on Islamic State has been devastating in city after recaptured city, though not yet terminal as some have made out.
The decision to de-fund Unesco, which had become so ideologically vicious that it even officially stated that the Jews were not historically connected to King Solomon’s temple, was long overdue.
Then there is the fact that some of the more contentious promises have been shelved.
For Trump seems not to be building the massive wall he promised on the Mexican border, at least not in the way that it was originally envisaged.
He did not manage to get through the repeal of Obamacare that he wanted, thereby not inflaming tens of millions of poorer Americans.
Nor should one assume that projected defeats for Republican candidates in the mid-term elections on November 6 will mean Trump will not win the presidency again in 2020.
Obama got what he candidly called a ‘shellacking’ in the mid-terms in 2010, but then went on to win re-election comfortably in 2012, and there have been many other examples further back in history.
Americans treat their midterm elections rather like by-elections and council elections – largely as opportunities to punish the incumbent government for short-term reasons, rather than signal the way we will vote in a general election.
If the US economy continues to improve, not least because of Trump’s widespread deregulation, there is no reason why he could not be re-elected in 2020.
The Democrats are perfectly capable of choosing another terrible candidate to stand against him, as they did with Hillary Clinton.
If they select Bernie Sanders or the equally left-wing Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, they would throw the election to Trump in the same way they did in 2016.
It is, therefore, not impossible that we have just seen the first of eight years of a Trump presidency, not least because Special Investigator Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian links seems to have gone nowhere.
Needless to say, it would be great if President Trump could control the tweeting thumbs on those huge hands of his, but that seems wildly unlikely.
The mine-is-bigger-thanyours diplomacy towards North Korea was painful to watch as a friend of America’s, but at least Trump was unwilling to ignore the issue of Kim Jong Un in the way Obama did for eight years.
Having met President Trump, I can attest to his planet-sized ego, but the fact remains that we have to make the best of what we have got, possibly until January 2025.
It is not fake news to say that, for all the vulgarity, aggression and offensiveness, what he has actually done this past year is by no means all bad, and some of it might turn out to be very good.
People you like can do things you don’t, but we should remember that vice-versa is also true.
He’s made important gains that were beyond Obama