Trump 1-yr Retrospective

Shortly after Trump’s election, I wrote a few pieces on the subject, including “Why I Like Trump… AND Hillary” and “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Both of these included predictions, so it’s time to evaluate how those predictions played out.

Qualitative Expectations
My main argument in favor of Trump was:
“If ever there was a complete huckster, a con-man who is master at the art of schmoozing and suckering, it's Trump. One of the two things that I really like about a Trump presidency is that there's no way in hell this guy is keeping his campaign promises. [...] The other thing I really like about Trump is that he has an established reputation for bringing in the most competent people to do the actual work. [...] if Trump's presidency goes anything like I expect, he'll be offloading all the work to extremely competent people, and he'll spend his time going around blustering and bullshitting and generally telling the public whatever they want to hear. In the best case, the competent people will get a great deal of freedom to do what needs to be done, while Trump bullshits the media.”

Over the past year, I’ve sat down at least four times to write a post saying I was wrong about Trump and he’s an awful president. Every time, I started by re-reading the above. And every time, I thought “actually, that’s mostly still true”. In every case, Trump was doing something really awful under a huge media spotlight… but ultimately with little impact. (Most notable examples are the Muslim travel ban and the trans military ban, both of which withered away in court.)

That said, I definitely got some parts wrong. Even without explicitly predicting much competence from Trump himself, I still overestimated his general competence and underestimated his awfulness. The trans military ban in particular was completely indefensible, even if it ultimately had little impact other than a media circus. Also, covfefe.

On the “hiring competent people front”, six months ago I was totally ready to admit that didn’t happen. But since then, the incompetent people have largely been fired - most notably Bannon. Tillerson’s great, Kelly’s great, Mnuchin’s solid, Gorsuch’s stellar. I don’t like Sessions, but I can’t fault his competence (and I’m sure many of you would say the same for some of the other names I’ve listed). It’s still not 100%, but overall, the “Trump serves as media shit umbrella while competent people do their thing” model seems to be up and running.

Specific Prediction Performance
Alright, time to march down the list of more specific predictions from “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Here were the main predictions, by header:

• Term limits/lobbying/etc. Predictions: no term limits, lobbying & fundraising limits unlikely, hiring and regulation freezes plausible. Result: no term limits, no lobbying & fundraising limits, hiring and regulation freezes both happened. 
• Trade, jobs, EPA. Predictions: abandoning TPP and renegotiating NAFTA were plausible, and cutting various environmental regulations and funding was likely. Result: NAFTA is still on hold, but this stuff has mostly happened. 
• Immigration & Misc. Predictions: pro-judicial-constraint, mostly ignore abortion & gay marriage, lots of noise but not much substantive change on immigration. Result: judicial appointment specifically known for “textualism”, mostly ignored abortion & gay marriage, mostly noise on immigration so far. 

To be fair, I hedged by not giving numerical probabilities for these. Overall, things I found “unlikely” didn’t happen, things I found “plausible” or “likely” almost all happened. The biggest single thing I was wrong about was immigration: there’s already been more substantive damage there than I expected, and likely more to come. Even so, “mostly noise” still seems like an accurate description.

Next, I had a list of predictions about Trump’s legislative agenda. I won’t go through the whole list - most of them haven’t seen any major bill in Congress, which wasn’t a possibility I accounted for. The big two have obviously been healthcare and taxes; I predicted both of these would be high priorities and would definitely pass with all-Republican president and Congress. Obviously, I was very wrong about one of those, and very right about the other. Overall, I don’t think I outperformed (or underperformed) pundit predictions on the legislative front.

Finally, I predicted that Trump wouldn’t do anything particularly awful which wasn’t on the list. The trans military ban proved me wrong on that front, though happily it’s been the one exception to a generally-accurate rule. With that one exception, I think I had a generally accurate idea of what we were in for under a Trump presidency.

Main conclusion, one year later: damn, that was a LOT of media noise.

Would I do it again?
At this point… not sure. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that Trump would perform worst relative to Hillary over the first year. Hillary’s big advantage was already having the day-to-day president skill set and knowledge base. I expect the worst of Trump has passed, and we’re just now getting to the point where the good parts might shine. We’ll see.