President Trump's Scorecard Thus Far

What follows on this Independence Day weekend is a quick, off the top of my head, incomplete and perhaps somewhat sloppy scorecard of President Trump’s policies and their consequences over his first six months in office.

DOMESTIC

Economy:

Stock market at historic highs. Inflation near historic lows with gas prices below $2.00 in some places. Unemployment is lower and moving further in the right direction. Manufacturing, construction and energy sectors all booming, with deregulation promising even more and greater gains for the foreseeable future. Real wages up; taxes down and tariffs being collected. A+++

While DOGE is conceptionally an A+++. DOGE in reality, however, sometimes comes off as too arbitrary and the numbers that I see don’t appear as significant as advertised. It, then, is too obscure in the details and too early in its effect to grade. INCOMPLETE.

Law and order:

Border secure. Leftist riots quelled by the National Guard. Child trafficking rings disbanded. Violent crime down 15 percent. A+

While some stories about how arrests and deportations have been handled can be disturbing, the reality is, given the magnitude of the effort, these stories are extremely few. Meanwhile, even these appear to be more the product of spin and hype from an activist media and the consequences of wrongful and often illegal acts by leftist state and local governments and individuals hindering a more orderly process than they do either intent or policy.

Overall A+

Morale:

Patriotism is back! President Trump’s unifying themes are bringing the country together after years of the race-based and “gender”-based divide-and-conquer rhetoric of the Biden administration. The end of DEI alone has greatly righted the wrongs of the recent past and begun a return to the merit-based society that fosters greatness.

Loved the celebration of the 250th anniversary of America’s army and the joyousness of President Trump’s continuing rallies.

The result of all this is that the morale of the American people has skyrocketed. Military recruitment is going gangbusters, investors are bullish on America’s future and, for the first time in decades, a plurality — and even a majority — of Americans are saying that the nation is on the right track.

A+

I wish at times President Trump was better able to articulate the specifics of his policies and the things they’ve accomplished, but that doesn’t detract from his accomplishments.

Overall, after just six months in office, President Trump gets an A+ from me on domestic policy.

FOREIGN

Before we get to the big ones, let’s give credit to President Trump for securing peace between India and nuclear-armed Pakistan: a triumph that the latter plans to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace prize for — something he should have won in his first administration for the Abraham Accords.

Other diplomatic accomplishments that have made the world safer include peace/ceasfire accords between Serbia and Kosovo, Egypt and Ethiopia and Rwanda and Congo. While these places may seem obscure or far away, in the world we live in nothing is far away and these wars have been long-runnng and, until President Trump got involved, seemingly intractable.

Nothing the President has done on the foreign stage, however, even compares to his success in choosing to — and then succeeding in — eliminating Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

As much as the “isolationists” have tried to sell the idea that America has no vested interest in the outcome of the war between Iran and Israel, nothing could be further from the truth.

Iran is a belligerent and aggressive Islamicist terror state with tentacles throughout the entire region and beyond. It is the most destabilizing force in the world’s most volatile region. It is a region that is situated at the crossroads of three continents and exercises veto power over two of the world’s most essential waterways and a third of the world’s oil.

Eliminating them as a threat changes the geopolitical realities of the entire world and makes peace throughout the Middle East — once thought to be an impossibility — only even more likely under President Trump’s stewardship. The fact that this was accomplished without a single shot being fired at American planes, a single boot on the ground or a single US casualty — much less a “forever war” as the isolationists fearmongered — deserves an A+++ both for the timing (waiting until after Israel had destroyed Iran’s air defenses) and execution.

By destroying Iran’s nuclear ambitions, President Trump accomplished even more, though. He showed that, unlike under previous presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump says what he means and means what he says and is willing to back it up with force.

This will surely serve to deter others like China and North Korea from threatening other strategic allies like Taiwan and South Korea.

For my entire adult life the four great threats to the world have been Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. With this one mission, President Trump has severely weakened and/or deterred three of them.

The fourth — Russia — has been severely weakened by its war against Ukraine. The fact that this tiny nation has been able to fight this one-time superpower to a standstill over the course of three-and-a-half years has been good for the world. Over this time, Ukraine has depleted Russia’s weapons, eliminated many of its best soldiers, devastated its economy and proved Russia to be little more than a paper tiger.

(Compare and contrast what America showed with the mission in Iran and that fact becomes even more significant.)

Given what Ukraine has and continues to accomplish against this fourth of the world’s four great threats, President Trump’s anti-Zelenskyy rhetoric and behavior confuses me. I’m not sure what he thinks it will accomplish and, whatever it might be, I don’t think it’s been accomplished. Given the fact that Trump’s rhetoric hasn’t caused Ukraine to lose the war and Ukraine’s continued ability to stave off the Russian advances, however, make this more of a rhetorical issue than a practical one and so, again, I will not deduct points from the President’s scorecard for it.

At the same time that Trump can take credit for making the world safer by weakening and/or deterring Iran, China and North Korea — and with Russia being weakened by its war with Ukraine — the President can also take credit for strengthening our allies. Whereas, prior to Trump, American presidents have long begged, pleaded with and cajoled our NATO allies to simply pay their fair share for their own defense, only President Trump has been able to get them to do it. In fact, he got them to pledge two-and-a-half times the previously agreed upon amount.

The stronger our allies the more deterence they offer against invasion, the better able they are to repel any such invasion if it should occur and the less likely America will have to rescue them yet again.

Weaker enemies and stronger allies is about the best one fan hope for in foreign policy and the first six months of Trump’s second administration has accomplished just that across many of the world’s most important regions.

If I do have one negative, it is, again, Trump’s rhetorical style. Rather than make the case for American control of Greenland or Panama, he came off as bullying and bellicose. While it doesn’t seem to have hurt America’s relations with these nations, it did backfire in Canada, where it turned their election from a referendum on the failed Leftist government which the Leftists would have lost, into a referendum on Trump and whether Canada should become America’s fifty-first state (which the conservative then lost for being to close to America and Trump.)

Given the fact that the consequences of that election are far more devastating to Canada than they are to America and that Canada simply has no choice but to play ball with its Big Brother to the south, it’s not going to have great consequences for us but, still, I’m deducting half-a-point and thus only the A++ for foreign policy instead of an A+++

As much as the Leftist media has tried to make the president’s policies look bad or eratic — and despite the fearmongering narrative of the isolationists (and, some Jew-haters) who sought to prevent the destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities — it is hard to even conjure an issue, either foreign or domestic, where the President’s instincts and actions haven’t turned out to be right. Typically very right.

Evan Sayet is the author of the bestselling books The KinderGarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks and The Woke Supremacy. His books are available on Amazon.com.

and that is the rhetoric he directed toward Canada which, I believe, backfired and gave the election there to the Leftists when he turned it from a referendum on the failed policies of the socialists and turned it into a referendum on Candian patriotism.