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Trump's Year in Review: Here Are His Biggest Accomplishments in 2017

January 02, 2018
Staff

WRITER

How did President Donald Trump fare in the first year of his presidency? Doc recently guest-hosted for Glenn and covered some of Trump’s major accomplishments in 2017. What do you think of his list of Trump’s wins?

“It was a pretty good year,” Doc said. “I’ve got to give the guy credit.”

  • Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court

  • Republicans passed a major tax reform bill

  • Jerusalem recognized as the official capital of Israel

  • U.S. withdrew from the Paris climate accord

  • Obama administration’s deal with Cuba rescinded

  • EPA regulations rolled back

Listen to the audio clip or read the transcript below for more.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

DOC: Let's talk about the truth now. Because I mentioned, yes, Glenn Beck did not support vote for or support President Trump. I didn't as well. But we've been pretty honest, calling the balls and strikes as we see them.

Is that good, or is that bad? And early on, the first big thing President Trump did was appoint Neil Gorsuch. And by some people's desire or reason they voted for him, that was enough.

Fill that seat that was vacated by Antonin Scalia, with a true conservative. Maybe that was enough. And I gave him high marks for that.

Then the following couple months, not a lot got done. There were some things that I didn't like. A little bombastic. Still gave him high marks. Okay. And that's kind of been the malaise I think during the summers. Little stories here and there. And the media just obsesses over his tweet and fake news claims and this stuff. And I didn't I say do the math and add up what the president had accomplished. Because, by the way, did they repeal Obamacare? Nope. Didn't get it done.

A lot of stuff we were hoping that they didn't get done, but that's they, the party, including the Republicans in Congress.

If you look at President Trump's track record, it was a pretty good year. Shockingly good year.

When I went down the list to prepare for today, I got to give the guy credit. So Neil Gorsuch, he did sign the tax reform bill.

Now, Congress did a lot of that work. So give them their due. The president did use the bully pulpit and suggest, you know, dropping the corporate tax rate down to 20 percent. It ended up being 21. Still good. But he did sign it and support it and got behind it.

He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Said they were going to remove the embassy. Okay. That's pretty big for people who supported him, supported Israel, said that's what should happen there. That's a huge step that everybody else has kicked the can down the road. Right? Clinton did it. Bush did it. Obama did it. All when they're campaigning. Absolutely.

Got to be in Jerusalem. That's American policy since the '90s or whatever.

You going to do it? Well -- so you support it? Oh, absolutely.

But you're going to move it? Well...

That's what they're doing, right? Because they're playing both sides. They're playing politics. He said we're going to do it. Okay.

He signed an executive order that demanded that two regulations be killed for every new one that it creates. When that happened, I said, fantastic, if they do it. So far, he has.

He's eliminated more than he's created. It's a -- by a huge margin. Can't remember the percent. It's like 8-1 or something. They've actually done it. He cut 16 rules and regulations for every one. But that's an old statistic from months ago. So I don't know what the actual updated number is. But it's at least that. And this is a little loose. It saves 8.1 billion. That metric is a little off. But the number of rules and regulations cut versus created is true. He signed 15 congressional regulatory cuts by themselves.

He withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. Okay. That's pretty significant.

KAL: People flipped out on that one.

DOC: They did. And when it was out -- I even talked about it. But looking back, now even more significant than I realized at the time, because there's a lot going on. You know what I mean?

Signed an exact order. Cutting the time for infrastructure permit approvals.

Okay. That's a little less, but still solid. He withdrew from the TPP. Huge.

And I remember why I didn't give him enough credit for that one. Because it was not -- we're pull out of the TPP. It was, well, we're going to do this. Think we're going to do that? Yeah, we pulled out.

It was, he almost didn't do himself a service as people. Because some of this stuff he campaigns on, then when it comes down to it, there's a moment of hesitation. Maybe they're just playing the media, whatever it is.

But then they do it. But during that hesitation, I'm like, ah, he's not doing it, or whatever. Then, okay. Great. He did it.

So it doesn't get -- it's not like he rode into town and said, here's all the stuff I'm going to do. We're pulling out of this stuff. Boom, boom, boom. And you go, hurray. But that's the reason I want to bring up the facts and go down the list.

He started renegotiating NAFTA. Now, that was not as big an issue for some people. But it's worth looking at. He ended Obama's deal with Cuba. Awesome.

Why all of a sudden did we suddenly say, yeah, Cuba is not a problem.

He opened up 77 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling. Solid thing. Expanded some of the different infrastructure projects when it comes to energy, like the Keystone Pipeline. Awesome.

He ordered the EPA to kill Obama's clean power plan. Awesome. And as part of that, he rolled back Obama's attempt to regulate all US waterways. Remember, he was using the Clean Water Act, that even literally the mud puddle behind your house could have been covered. The federal government would have jurisdiction over. Which is ridiculous. It was never designed for that. He rolled that back.

Laid out and challenged now new plans to challenge and stop migration. Ended Obama's catch and release program of illegals.

Has arrested more illegals inside the US now. Started the end of DACA. That's another one that he kind of waffled on when it came down to it, or it seemed like he was going to waffle, but ended up doing the right thing.

Attempted to and in some ways have cracked down on US sanctuary cities. Of course, that was challenged at the Supreme Court. And they said they can't do it. But he did the right thing. Did everything within his power as far as that goes. Has added 100 additional immigration judges to start processing those cases. Awesome. Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City policy, which is misleading. It has nothing really to do with Mexico City or immigration or anything like that.

That's the money -- the foreign aid that is used for abortions, where people get money in foreign aid form, and they can use it for abortion. And he rolled that back

He withdrew from the UN global compact on migration, which is wonderful. They have just said that they are going to -- this is the last couple of days. Nikki Haley announced that they are cutting UN funding. He signed the VA Whistle-blower Act, to crack down. And as part of that, the Veterans Appeal Improvement and Modernization Act and signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act.

Now, those are all good steps. More has to be done. Much, much more with the VA. But that's far more than Obama did with that. Just the Whistle Protection Act and their ability to now hold people accountable, where they can be fired.

Now, as soon as he took office, he fired a bunch of people at the VA, at the top. Some of them got their jobs back. That's no fault of his.

That ended up being unions and courts and everything else. But the president did what was right.

Net neutrality wasn't him directly. But on his watch, with his support, one of his guys --

KAL: Didn't he appoint the guy?

DOC: One of them, yeah. Yeah, he didn't get to appoint all of them. Because you still got Mignon Clyburn. Filet Mignon Cly- -- did you know that's Jim Clyburn's daughter? James Clyburn, the forever congressman from South Carolina.

KAL: No, I didn't know that.

DOC: She has no history of telecommunications or anything like that, but she works for the FCC. Hmm. Yeah, she got her job fair and square, I'm sure.

So these are just some of the things that President Trump has done. From a conservative/Libertarian standpoint, that's pretty solid.

Any of the other failures of things like Obamacare, could he have led more on it? Could he have said we need specifically just a repeal, use the bully pulpit more? Maybe. But if you had asked me a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, my opinion on all of these, how do you want a president to rule on this, this, and this? And vote and rescind on executive order and whatever. I would have supported these.

KAL: At least with the Obamacare, didn't he get the fine removed? Like you don't get fined anymore --

DOC: Right. Exactly. The teeth are out of it. You still have to have it by law. But you're not going to have it anymore. So a little bit. I mean, I'm wanting a grander statement of change. But as far as President Trump has gone. When I look back over all the stuff over the last year, he has used his office with most of these actions the right way. And this is in many cases rolling back many of the problems, many of the things that Obama did, some of it unconstitutionally during his eight years. It's going to take a while.

That's the truth.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.