After the defeat of the health care bill, Democrats were crowing about how few accomplishments Donald Trump had racked up. But Washington Post writer James Hohmann (no Trump cheerleader) has an article detailing just how many different actions taken by President Trump have advanced his agenda — even if they get little media attention.
Despite the chaos and the growing credibility gap, Trump is systematically succeeding in his quest to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon puts it. He’s pursued the most aggressive regulatory rollback since Ronald Reagan, especially on environmental issues, with a series of bills and executive orders. He’s placed devoted ideologues into perches from which they can stop aggressively enforcing laws that conservatives don’t like. By not filling certain posts, he’s ensuring that certain government functions will simply not be performed. His budget proposal spotlighted his desire to make as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible wither on the vine.