Someone just noticed that Trump is getting stuff

Posted: Aug 9, 2017

After weeks and months of fixating on tweets and Russia, someone in the press decided to have a look at what the Trump administration has been up to since January. Lo and behold, they discovered that it's getting a lot done. "Trump Has Quietly Accomplished More Than It Appears" reads the headline in the Atlantic. "With the Trump administration's chaos sucking up all the attention," the article begins, "it's been able to move forward on a range of its priorities.... It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come." It goes on to detail these achievements, many of which we've highlighted on these pages. Border crossings, for example, have plummeted, even though all Trump has done so far is promise to enforce existing laws. The Supreme Court approved parts of Trump's travel ban, a success made possible by Trump's appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the bench. Trump is busy filling lower court positions with conservative justices. Ron Klain, a White House aide to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said that Trump "is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers." What else? Well, Trump pulled out of the Paris climate change deal, which as we noted in this space is a huge win for the economy. The EPA, meanwhile, is dismantling Obama's coal-killing, growth-choking Clean Power Plan, and draining the heavy-handed Waters of the United States rule. When a veteran EPA official resigned this week, she complained in a letter to her former colleagues that "the new EPA Administrator already has repeals of 30 rules under consideration," which the New York Times described as "a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency's 47-year history." Trump promised to kill two regulations for every new one enacted, but in his first six months the ratio was 16-to-1. Trump also approved the Keystone XL and other pipeline projects held up by Obama. He's also rolled back a ban on coal mining on public lands. To be sure, Trump hasn't scored a major legislative achievement on signature issues like ObamaCare and tax reform. The Atlantic writer describes the administration's achievements as something akin to a shadow government. But these actions aren't in the shadows. They're just being ignored by a media that is obsessed with digging up dirt on Trump. ;