Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon tallies the president’s accomplishments during the past week.
Can we pause for a moment to consider what has transpired in the last seven days?
TRADE: … [T]he Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with both Mexico and Canada to revise and rebrand the North America Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. This announcement fulfills one of President Trump’s key pledges on the campaign trail while benefiting constituencies in important states such as Michigan (autos) and Wisconsin and Minnesota (dairy). …
… ECONOMY: The Trump Bump continues, with Friday bringing news that unemployment has reached its lowest level since 1969. Consumer confidence is high, and data from the manufacturing and service sectors indicate continued growth. …
… JUDGES: … Kavanaugh’s elevation will secure a five-vote majority of originalist and textualist judges on the high court for the first time in modern memory. Such a transformation of the federal judiciary has been a goal of Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. …
… FOREIGN POLICY: President Trump is slowly and steadily re-orienting U.S. foreign policy to face the central challenge of the twenty-first century: the rise of China to great power status. …
… Trump has achieved all of these gains, in such disparate areas of policy, through totally unorthodox means. He brags, he intimidates, he pouts, he jokes, he insults, he is purposefully ambiguous, and he leaves no criticism unanswered. He is unlike any postwar American president, though he shares some qualities with LBJ and Reagan. He is frenetic and polarizing, a showboat and a salesman. His methods are over-the-top, combative, and divisive. In place of the politics of consensus he adopts the politics of confrontation.
