November 8th, 2017 was cataclysmic. President Trump’s name has been a permanent part of news headlines and hashtags alike since his election win was announced a year ago, and it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon. One year has passed, and now the effectiveness of his administration can be properly evaluated.
In all due respect, Trump has attempted to deliver on some of his campaign promises. Trump promised to reform American healthcare, and a House Obamacare repeal did pass in May, which cut core elements of Obamacare including its subsidies to help people get insurance coverage, expansion of Medicaid, taxes and mandates for people to get coverage. However, this contradicts Trump’s campaign promise to ensure “everyone gets healthcare” because the repeal removed accessibility to healthcare.
Moreover, Trump has been very inconsistent about his opinions regarding transgender rights. The most famous case of this was his executive order banning transgender troops in the military, which was recently blocked by a judge. However, he has been rather consistent on this and held his ground. This is not the case when discussing the rights of transgender students. In February 2017, the Trump administration reversed protections which established that transgender students in public schools had the freedom to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender. About a month later, Trump publicly stated that people should be allowed to use bathrooms anywhere they desired, even at his very own Trump Tower.
Other topics to discuss include:
- His controversial travel ban, which was rejected for a third time by a federal judge
- His decision to move the U.S Embassy In Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he announced that he would be stepping away from in order to focus more on obtaining peace between Israel and Palestine.
- His proposed tax cuts, which supposedly would provide substantial tax cuts for the middle class, but these claims were disproved in multiple studies.
- His promise to “eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors, and for people like me, but unfair to American workers,” and yet the administration’s 2017 tax legislation framework did not mention abolishing the carried interest tax break.
Some voters who supported Trump are shocked about this, but isn’t this quality exactly what got him elected in the first place? Many voters took a liking to Trump because he said exactly what he thought, and this transparency is hard to come by in most political spheres.
However, I wonder if Trump’s transparency is what caused his perpetual inconsistency in his presidency thus far.
All things considered, say whatever you will about Trump, but his inconsistency has been a hubris of his presidency. A president needs to be concrete in order to be reflective of the strength of our country. A lack of thereof insinuates that America is not united, and this is irrefutably detrimental. Many people elected President Trump because he would restore the American legacy, but is the image of a divided America really the legacy we wish to present to the world?
Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr
