Assessing the Trump administration thus far

It’s a little hard to assess how President Trump is doing so far since the liberal media and Democrats are doing everything they can, including creating fake news, to make things look as bad and chaotic as possible.  Yes, a judge has put his immigration executive order on hold, just like judges did with several of Obama’s executive orders. Yes, a couple of his nominees have had to withdraw, just as happened with Obama (remember Charles Freeman?). Yes, one of his staff, Michael Flynn, had to resign over some improprieties, just as in the Obama administration (remember Katherine Archuleta, Julia Pierson, David Petraeus, Erik Shinseki or Kathleen Sebelius, among others?).

As Scott Adams says in one of his recent blog postings, there are two movies running in people’s heads. The liberals, who desperately need to think Trump is failing, see disaster and chaos. Trump supporters, on the other hand, see a guy who is making a few rookie mistakes, but moving ahead smartly to deliver on exactly the campaign promises that got him elected - something new in Washington politics.

Of course Trump is an outsider up against the entire Washington establishment and massive Federal bureaucracy, who will do everything they can to prevent him from disturbing their cozy insider’s world or disturbing their groupthink assumptions.  I fully expected them to sink him before the nomination, but clearly he is a lot smarter and shrewder than anyone expected, and thus far demonstrably smarter and shrewder than the establishment. But the underhanded (and in fact, probably illegal) leaking of classified telephone taps by the intelligence community to sink Flynn shows how far the establishment will go to preserve their power and perks.

It’s too early, of course, to tell how he will do, but some of his early moves seem promising to me, and apparently Wall Street investors think the same thing, since the stock market is rocketing upward. For example, he seems to be willing to acknowledge that the Cold War with the Soviet Union is over and we face a different, though still troublesome, Russia, something the establishment foreign policy community still can’t seem to accept. And he seems prepared to drop the establishment fictions about the Israeli-Palestinian problem, since it has been apparent for years they were not helpful. And he has finally gotten NATO members to face up to meeting their commitments of devoting at least 2% of their GDP to defense (only 5 of the 28 members do that now), instead of just getting a free ride from America

But more to the point, he is moving rapidly to address the economy by cutting regulations (did you know that the Obama administration added 20,646 new regulations over his 8 years, 81,640 pages worth in just 2016!!!), and reforming the tax system (the Federal Tax code is now over 74,600 pages long!!!).  Whether these moves will work is not yet clear, but at least he is trying something new.

So on balance I am cautiously optimistic.  Of course he still has the same character flaws he had as a candidate – a thin skin and a short temper and a tendency to shoot from the hip (though some of that may be tactical). But it is not clear to me that these will, in the long run, interfere much with his effort to reform Washington. He has put pretty competent people, most of them also outsiders, into key positions in his administration, and they may well make the difference.

As I said in an earlier post, the state if the economy is the most important thing - everything else hangs on it - and the liberal’s real nightmare will be if he manages to actually boost growth from Obama’s anemic 2% into the 3-4% range. And he may well manage that.