Here is the fact: Donald Trump ran on the Republican ticket and the Senate has a GOP majority, which is the party that has promised to rid the nation of ObamaCare for the last seven years. As if that little piece of truth isn’t bad enough for the Donald Trump administration, the news gets worse for the Trump supporters.
Forget the noise about the palace intrigue and the scandals surrounding Trump and focus on the reality of the U.S. governance model.
Any long-term legislation must be approved by the Congress. That is the nature of the U.S. democracy, i.e. the checks-and-balances of the three parts of government.
Donald Trump has been telling those that are willing to listen to him that he has done more than any other president in history. Trump uses the numerous executive orders that he has signed to support his argument.
What Donald Trump has neglected to tell you and what his surrogates are hoping you do not notice is that presidential executive orders have limited shelf life and the inability to fundamentally change the public policy of the nation.
There are two things we can look at to prove this.
The first is that Donald Trump has trumpeted up the number of executive orders that he has issued to reverse or remove Barack Obama executive orders. The fact that Trump can use his executive orders to remove his predecessor’s executive orders clearly demonstrates that executive orders have a finite shelf life. They cannot be used to create long-term public policy.
The inability to repeal ObamaCare also demonstrates that presidential executive orders have inherent limits. If an executive order had the power to change national public policy then ObamaCare would be thing of the past.
That ObamaCare is still the law of the land proves that public policy can only be created through the legislature, which is Congress.
In this is where it all goes wrong for Donald Trump. Even with his party in control of both houses of Congress, Donald Trump has been unable to deliver the single most important legislation that both him, and his party both agree on – the repeal of ObamaCare.
Trump and surrogates are blaming the Democrats, who have no power to impede the revocation of ObamaCare, or to the so-called “swamp” politics of the nation. Lost in the misdirection attempts is that neither of these two issues would stop the repeal of ObamaCare if the Republican Congress had any belief in the legitimacy of the Donald Trump presidency.
Obviously, they do not.
Because of that, the Donald Trump presidency will likely go down in history and the “do nothing” presidency.