Tax reform. Two Supreme Court nominees safely installed on the bench. The travel ban. The bonfire of federal regulations. Criminal justice reform. Legislative action aimed at ameliorating the opioid crisis. Nato members ponying up more cash. Annual wage growth is at a nine-year high. 2018 was the best year for job creation since 2015. Many of his campaign pledges, such as the renegotiation of Nafta and the relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, have been kept. Promise made, promise kept is one of his boasts that regularly rings true.
Often, though, he blunts the impact of authentic good news with inflated claims. US Steel is not opening up six new plants. He is not the author of the biggest tax cut in American history. Besides, the trade war has penalised US manufacturers and farmers, and in 2018 the stock market suffered its worst year since the 2008 financial meltdown.
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Nor have we ever witnessed a US leader who has so flagrantly flouted the normal rules of presidential behaviour. The playground nicknames. The Twitter tirades. The ugly slurs - "horseface" for Stormy Daniels, a former porn star with whom he was once apparently intimate. In response to indictments in the Mueller probe, he has sometimes sounded more like the boss of a crime family. "A rat" is how he described his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, deploying the lingua franca of the Mafioso.