President Donald J. Trump applauds the crowd prior to delivering remarks in support of the Farmers to Families Food Box distribution program Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, at Flavor First Growers and Packers in Mills River, N.C. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Pat Buchanan runs down the many successes of Donald Trump’s first term as president. On his blog he writes (abridged):
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display.
By opening new lands and seas to exploration, building pipelines, permitting fracking and slashing regulations, Trump has brought the U.S. to an energy independence which other presidents only promised.
The Trump GOP has abandoned an ideological commitment to free trade that dates back to the Kennedy administration and reembraced the economic nationalism of the 19th-century Republicans who built the world’s greatest industrial and manufacturing power.
Globalism has been relegated to the ash heap of history as our populist president trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords, and began to impose tariffs on countries that have looted America’s manufacturing base.
Trump has also ended the decades-long freeriding of NATO allies on the U.S. defense budget, convincing many of them to contribute more.
He has made the Republican Party the pro-Israel Party.
While Trump has not extracted this country from the forever wars of the Middle East — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — he routed ISIS and kept us out of Libya’s civil war.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump has tabled the issue of immigration, especially mass illegal migration across the Southern border, and made progress on the border wall he made a feature of his 2016 campaign.
A discredited NAFTA has been replaced by a new trade deal,
Trump has done as much as Reagan to deregulate the U.S. economy and reduce taxes on workers, producers, and investors
He has nominated and elevated two Supreme Court justices and hundreds of federal judges.
Trump has also changed the character and composition of the GOP, making it more of a working- and middle-class party.
