According to the Heritage Foundation, a widely-respected conservative think tank, during his first year in office, Trump adopted nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Heritage’s agenda. By comparison, Heritage says that former President Reagan enacted only 49 percent of its policy prescriptions.
“There is so much noise in this town that I think it obscures the real work that’s being done,” Heritage president Kay Coles James told the New York Times. “This administration is doing quite well in terms of advancing a conservative agenda — clearly, quite well.”
In 2016, Heritage came up with 334 conservative policies, a wish-list of sorts, for a new Republican administration. Trump has enacted 64 percent of those items. In 1981, his first year in office, Reagan scratched off only 49 percent of the items on that year’s Heritage list.
Some of those on the right who opposed Trump have been gracious enough to admit they were wrong. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway took a look back at Trump’s first year and wrote last week:
Ironically, the very lack of conservative bona fides that worried me two years ago means he’s less beholden to a conservative establishment that had grown alienated from the people it is supposed to serve and from the principles it ostensibly exists to promote. His surprising conservatism might also be the result of the absolutism and extremism of his critics, whether among the media, traditional Democratic activists or the anti-Trump right. If Trump were ever inclined to indulge his liberal tendencies after winning the election, the stridency and spite of his opponents have provided him with no incentives to do so.
On his radio show Thursday, Dennis Prager, who was not a #NeverTrumper but supported Trump as a dead-last choice in the 16 person GOP primary, was just as gracious and insightful:
I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t ...Read More HERE
1 comment:
Reagan believed in politics as the art of the possible. He did a lot, but almost always within the established framework.
Trump is Mr Outside-The-Box. If he keeps up the current pace, he will exceed Reagan and many other Presidents in his accomplishments.
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