Keep His Promises? No...

Trump Plus One: Did He Keep His Promises?

A year after the president’s first speech to Congress, he’s done much less—and much more—than he said he would.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

resident Donald Trump’s first speech to Congress, initially hailed as a triumphant pivot from Keystone Kops chaos to presidential message discipline, was quickly overshadowed by a new Russia furor involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions promptly recused himself from the Russia investigation, which not only destroyed his relationship with Trump and paved the way for the fateful appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but ensured that no one would remember anything the president actually said in his prime-time State of the Union-style address.

Really, though, Trump might have been fortunate that the substance of that February 28 speech vanished so abruptly down the national memory hole. Because as Trump prepares to give his first real State of the Union on Tuesday, some of his forgotten promises from last year’s address to Congress look absurdly grandiose in retrospect.

This is what Trump vowed would happen because of his leadership: “Dying industries will come back to life … Our military will be given the resources its brave warriors so richly deserve. Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land. Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and, ultimately, stop … Above all else, we will keep our promises to the American people.”

Well, not yet. The industries that were dying before Trump took office are still dying; for example, U.S. coal consumption has dropped to its lowest level since the 1970s, despite Trump’s efforts to gut restrictions on coal-plant pollution. The military is continuing to make do with just about the same resources it had during the Obama administration. Trump has not yet submitted his long-promised infrastructure bill, and his plan reportedly envisions little new federal spending on public works; his initial budget actually proposed cuts in infrastructure investments for our very, very beautiful land. As for the opioid epidemic—which is now so rampant that it’s driving U.S. average life expectancy back downwards—Trump did declare it an emergency, but has not really done anything about it, except insofar as he has pushed for massive cuts in Medicaid, which would produce massive cuts in substance-abuse treatment programs. During his campaign, Trump had vowed to protect Medicaid from cuts, but he’s been rather selective about which promises to the American people he’s chosen to keep.

One promise from that speech that Trump has definitely kept was to reduce taxes on corporations. “It will be a big, big cut,” Trump vowed. Sure enough, the Republican-only bill that Trump signed was a big, big cut, permanently slashing the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while eliminating the alternative minimum tax for corporations. However, Trump also promised a border adjustment tax to make up for some of the lost revenue, which didn’t happen, while his promise of “massive tax relief for the middle class” ended up as modest and temporary tax relief for some middle-class families. And even though Trump complained that the national debt grew on President Barack Obama’s watch, his tax plan alone will add $1.5 trillion to the debt, reversing the deficit reduction trends of the Obama years.

The other main area where Trump’s policies have in fact reflected the spirit of his speech is immigration. Granted, he hasn’t yet fulfilled his most prominent promise: “We will soon begin the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border.” But his crackdown on undocumented immigrants is having a real impact. Arrests at the border are way down, because fewer migrants are trying to sneak across, while arrests inside the U.S. are way up, because federal immigration agents are no longer focusing exclusively on criminal aliens. Trump promised to make the U.S. a less welcoming country to outsiders, and he has delivered.

But Trump has failed to deliver on most of his promises, largely because, as some of us warned the night he made them, most of the promises were undeliverable. For example, Trump spent a long section of his speech laying out his principles for repealing Obamacare and replacing it with reforms that “expand choice, increase access, lower costs, and provide better health care.” But achieving all those goals was not compatible with repealing Obamacare, which had extended coverage to 20 million uninsured Americans while reducing medical cost growth to the lowest level in decades. Trump supported the Republican-only repeal legislation even though it did not really aim to achieve his stated goals, but it ultimately failed anyway, because several Republicans concluded it would undermine those goals.

In fact, while Trump’s claim that “Obamacare is collapsing” was completely false last year—there wasn’t a single “bare county” in America with no insurers, and independent analysts believed the Obamacare exchanges were stabilizing—it’s less false now. Trump has cut off payments to insurers that helped encourage them to serve the poor, killed the mandate that discouraged healthy Americans from going uninsured, and shrouded the program’s future in uncertainty. Lately, he’s even claimed that he’s already essentially repealed Obamacare, but that’s not true either.

As the president prepares to address the nation again, it’s worth keeping in mind that the things Trump says often lack any real-world connection to the things Trump does. He promised last year to “promote clean air and water,” but his EPA has launched a crusade against air and water regulations, and has yet to side against polluters on any major issue. He promised to “work with members of both parties” on a variety of issues, but so far his legislative agenda has been relentlessly partisan. He talked like a populist, pledging to focus on “families who just want a fair shot for their children,” but he has governed like a corporatist, siding with employers and investors over workers and consumers almost every time their interests have collided.

The first promise in Trump’s 2017 speech, following an opening riff about Black History Month and the importance of civil rights, seemed uncontroversial to the point of banality: “We are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.” But Trump would break even that promise, too, refusing to condemn neo-Nazi agitators in Charlottesville, repeatedly retweeting white supremacists, making a point of attacking prominent African-Americans like Jay-Z, Steph Curry, Jemele Hill and the NFL players who have publicly protested police brutality. Trump also promised that “our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety, and opportunity,” but he has yet to announce any major policies to help inner cities, and his budget proposal would have slashed funding to inner cities.

It is true, as Trump recently tweeted in all-caps to Jay-Z, that the black jobless rate has declined to the lowest rate since the government began monitoring it in the 1970s. That’s awesome. But the black jobless rate was dropping long before Trump took office, from a high of 16.5 percent in 2011 to 7.8 percent when Obama left the White House. It’s good that it’s kept dropping to 6.8 percent today, but Trump has done nothing to change its trajectory. He’s merely stopped calling that trajectory a catastrophe, and started calling it evidence that he’s made America great again.

In fact, by the standards Trump used to trash the Obama era in his speech to Congress, the Trump era has been another economic nightmare. “Ninety-four million Americans are out of the labor force!” he complained last year. That was true at the time, if you included students, retirees and the disabled, but today, 95.5 million Americans are out of the labor force. “Over 43 million Americans are on food stamps,” Trump said last year. This year, it’s still over 42 million. “Our trade deficit in goods last year was nearly $800 billion!” Trump marveled. Under Trump, the trade deficit is increasing.

Of course, the Trump economy is not a nightmare at all; it’s fine, just like the Obama economy was fine. All that’s changed is the spin. Crime was historically low last year when Trump was denouncing the “lawless chaos” that had overrun America, and it will still be low on Tuesday night if he declares victory over the chaos. America wasn’t a nightmare before Trump, but claiming it was helped get Trump elected, and now he’ll get to take credit for the non-nightmarish state of the union.

Then again, Trump didn’t just promise to end Obama’s dystopia. He promised to transform it into a new utopia, so that “our children will grow up in a nation of miracles.” That’s going to be a much tougher marketing challenge when the overall state of the union hasn’t changed much. Last year, Trump stood before Congress with a bold vision of American renewal: “Cures to illnesses that have always plagued us are not too much to hope. American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream. Millions lifted from welfare to work is not too much to expect.”

That kind of vision will be harder to spin. It will happen or it won’t.