The President's First Year

President Trump has taken a remarkable and unprecedented drubbing in the media this year, but he's nevertheless ending 2017 with numerous accomplishments to his credit, and even some of his critics are beginning to acknowledge it.

Axios discusses just a portion of what has been achieved in the first year of the Trump presidency:

• The big picture: You might not like his words or actions. But measured in terms of what Republican voters want and expected, he's winning on important fronts:
• The tax bill passed with almost unanimous Republican support, before the end of the year, and in keeping with mostly mainstream conservative orthodoxy. Trump won a bigger corporate tax break than either Bush ever got, and will sign the most consequential new tax law in 30 years. And he followed through on cutting taxes for most small businesses and most Americans. He did this without losing a single GOP senator — even his harshest critics.
• He failed to repeal all of Obama's health-care law. But Trump axed the individual mandate with the tax bill, and has chipped away at other parts of the law's foundation. Again, you might hate the outcome. But it's a significant step to blowing up a program most Republicans demanded be destroyed.
• Axios health-care editor Sam Baker emails: "The smaller administrative steps Trump has taken — an executive order, cuts to enrollment outreach, ending a critical stream of funding for insurers — [are cumulatively] weakening the ACA's insurance exchanges and prompting some insurers to question whether those markets are worth the trouble."
• Trump has tilted the court rightward in lasting ways. Justice Neil Gorsuch was a substantial, conservative addition to the Supreme Court. And it wasn't a one-off: The dozen new U.S. Circuit Court judges he has named is the most during a president's first year in office in more than a century.
• Trump has followed through on eviscerating regulations, many of them imposed by Obama. He has revoked 67, and delayed or derailed more than 1,500 others.
• No matter that much of it is not of his doing, the economy has grown consistently under his watch.
• ISIS is in retreat. The N.Y. Times' Ross Douthat calls it "A War Trump Won."

All of these points are profoundly significant and as might be expected the media have been largely loath to talk about any of them. At CNN and MSNBC they're still fixated on Russian collusion and the Mueller investigation, hoping that something will come of it that'll force Trump from office.

Ross Douthat is a fierce but honest anti-Trumper at the New York Times, and the column referred to above praises, albeit somewhat grudgingly, Trump's foreign policy successes in the Middle East. He writes:

There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice.

I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams.

Its defeat was begun under Obama, and the hardest fighting has been done by Iraqis — but this was an American war too, and we succeeded without massive infusions of ground troops, without accidentally getting into a war with Russia, and without inspiring a huge wave of terrorism in the West.

Why haven’t we noticed this success?....

[T]his is...a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested....

I include myself in this indictment. Foreign policy is the place where the risks of electing Trump seemed to me particularly unacceptable, and I’ve tended to focus on narratives that fit that fear, from the risk of regional war in Middle East to the perils in our North Korean brinksmanship.

Those fears are still reasonable. But all punditry is provisional, and for now, the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East has been moderately successful, and indeed close to what I would have hoped for from a normal Republican president following a realist-internationalist course.

In particular, Trump has avoided the temptation often afflicting Republican uber-hawks, in which we’re supposed to fight all bad actors on 16 fronts at once. Instead he’s slow-walked his hawkish instincts on Iran, tolerated Assad and avoided dialing up tensions with Russia. The last issue is of course entangled with the great collusion debate — but it’s still a good thing that our mini-cold war has remained relatively cool and we aren’t strafing each other over Syria.

Douthat goes on to commend the Trump team for its handling of the Saudis, the Yemen calamity, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He closes with this:

The rule with this White House is that if you write in praise of anything it has done, something disastrous swiftly follows. So if this column conjures up a Saudi invasion of Lebanon, a renewed intifada, or something terrible in the Koreas — well, I apologize in advance.

But if you had told me in late 2016 that almost a year into the Trump era the caliphate would be all-but-beaten without something far worse happening in the Middle East, I would have been surprised and gratified. So very provisionally, credit belongs where it’s due — to our soldiers and diplomats, yes, but to our president as well.