Update to this story.
Via TWS:
Two days after the 2016 election, we had this to say about Donald Trump’s stunning victory:
“We opposed him early and often, and we didn’t think he’d win. We lamented his ignorance, criticized his crudity, and catalogued his untruthfulness. We were troubled by his foreign policy noninterventionism, his antitrade demagoguery, by his lack of discipline and judgment, and also by the likelihood that he would disappoint far too many of his enthusiastic followers, especially those whose policy views we shared.
“We don’t regret having fully aired all of our many differences. Our concerns about his character and some of his policies don’t disappear because he won an election. But he did win an election. The Republican majority in Congress was sustained, arguably because of, rather than despite, his efforts. And more than all of that, he is the president-elect—he is America’s president-elect. We want him to succeed.”
We went on to list the number of ways a Trump presidency would be better than four years of Hillary Clinton in the White House and ended by hoping that just as we had been wrong about Trump’s electoral prospects, we would turn out to be even more mistaken about the kind of president he would be.
It is a little more than six months into the Trump administration, and there have been things to praise. The president has begun rolling back the aggressive regulatory state that grew up under Barack Obama; enforced his predecessor’s red line in Syria; abandoned the failed North Korea strategy of the last three administrations; and appointed strong conservatives to the lower courts along with, of course, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
These stand out because they are exceptions to the daily turmoil and dysfunction of the Trump White House. As president, Donald Trump has not risen to the occasion. There was no pivot to normalcy after his turbulent campaign. No hidden statesman has emerged from inside Trump, and he has not, as he recently suggested he might, become “more presidential” than anyone other than “the late, great Abraham Lincoln.”
So far, the president is the picture of a failed leader. His administration is a disaster.