Opinion | The Failure of Donald Trump

There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that is wholly unique. What Donald Trump has done is turn the amp up to 11 on places that his predecessors have had built on in the past. So on the one hand, we can go back to Obama’s pen and phone moment. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.” In a lot of ways can see Trump doing a much bigger pen and a much bigger phone, and really having all of government by executive action. In another lens, you could go all the way back to the Progressive Era — you know, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Era, where they think Congress is a bunch of dum-dums coming from wherever. What if we did government by experts in the executive branch? So, in another sense, Trump is the endpoint of this 100-year experiment that we’ve been running of: Meh, let’s just have the presidency do it all. So it’s the endpoint. So where are we ending? What has Trump actually succeeded in claiming and where have his claims fallen short or not achieved as much as it looked like they might? I say it’s an endpoint because it is so obviously failed. He has failed to implement any of his major policy initiatives through executive order in any realistic sense. You think about Alien Enemies Act, federalizing the National Guard, worldwide tariffs, birthright citizenship. These are the main pillars of Donald Trump’s policy presidency, the substantive aspects of it. And they’ve all failed with the exception of birthright citizenship, which is going to.