President Donald Trump has been in power for nearly a year now and through it all, he battled both the mainstream American and international media, the Democrats in U.S. Congress as well as members of his own party. Trump has managed to get a significant portion of his agenda up and running and he is ready to go into the new year with the upper hand.
While he signed an Executive Order on his first day in office, Jan. 20, which regarded lightening the "burden of Obamacare" as his first action, which was both more far-reaching and sparked the first major controversy of his administration, was the so-called "Muslim travel ban," dubbed as such erroneously.One of Trump's major campaign points was illegal immigration and the dangers it poses to the citizens of any country that has uncontrolled mass immigration.
Citing the multiple terrorist attacks in Europe, which have left hundreds dead and thousands more injured in Paris, London, Berlin and many other European cities, he ordered on Jan. 27 that travel and refugee admissions be temporarily restricted from seven Muslim-majority countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya. The restriction is supposed to halt travel until proper and safe channels can be established.The travel restriction went through leaps and bounds over the year before the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled, seven to two, that it could be legally implemented due to U.S. Code 1182, subsection F, which gives the president complete authority over immigration if he feels like a specific group could be a threat to national security. The ruling was an enormous win for Trump.
Under his administration, the entry of illegal immigrants has dropped to almost insignificant levels as thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been hired. These actions not only mean that less criminal aliens will enter the United States, but that working class citizens will not have to compete on the basis of wage with the illegals, who are willing to work for much less, making them more desirable employees for certain businesses, despite the illegality of the situation.
During the campaign, Trump had also pledged to "build a great, great wall on our southern border," prototypes of which are currently being constructed and tested.
Another one of his main pledges though, namely to "repeal and replace Obamacare," has not been as successful.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed in 2009 under Trump's predecessor, Obama, aimed to do what its name said; however, unfortunately it ended up doing the exact opposite for a significant portion of Americans.The Trump administration attempted seven times throughout the year to both repeal and replace the ACA, however all of these efforts failed.
Eventually, Trump decided to weaken Obamacare further via executive actions, despite the fact that he said it would be "politically" preferable to let it die and force the Democrats to cooperate with him and replace the plan with a more functional bill.
As candidate, nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump criticized NATO for not doing enough to fight terrorism, leading to very widespread speculations that he wanted to undermine the alliance and probably even dissolve it. These assumptions proved to be false, and in fact the organization took steps to fix some of its shortcomings before Trump was inaugurated. One very legitimate criticism, however, namely that only five of NATO's 28 member states direct two percent of their GDP to defense is still standing. Indeed, Only the U.S. (3.61 percent), Greece (2.38 percent), Britain (2.21 percent), Estonia (2.16 percent) and Poland (2 percent) are within the agreed-upon margins.
Trump had also criticized China on many fronts during the campaign, raising yet more fears that a "trade war" might start between the two giants; however, the U.S. president has been nothing but on good terms with China's Xi Jinping and the only actual pressure the U.S. government is putting on the Red Dragon has been over North Korea and its dictator, Kim Jong-Un, dubbed "Little Rocket Man" at the U.N. by President Trump."Rocket Man" has indeed launched a number of ballistic missiles, all of which landed into the seas surrounding the Korean Peninsula, but Pyongyang launched two missiles which actually flew over Japan aIn addition, another possible nuclear test was also conducted by the regime.
President Trump has repeatedly warned North Korea that the U.S. is ready to respond militarily should any harm come to it or its allies.