By Francis Menton
Excerpt: Our current President Trump carries the concept of “energy in the executive” to an extreme level, undertaking a dizzying array of initiatives, with new ones emerging so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up. Many of Trump’s initiatives have corrected disastrous and destructive policies of the Biden and Obama years. But with so many initiatives, perhaps it is inevitable that some will be misfires; or perhaps Trump lacks a capacity for self-criticism to distinguish his good ideas from the bad ones.
So I thought it might be useful to compile a short list of a few of Trump’s best and worst undertakings. I’m going to pick three of each. Obviously, readers may have different ideas as to which belong in the “best” and “worst” categories. And I’m only selecting a few on each side of the ledger. Have I maybe missed the very worst one?
Best Trump Initiatives
(1) Reversing the suppression of American energy production
At the very top of my list is the remarkable total reversal of the Obama/Biden policies of suppression of energy production. Obama and Biden had set the U.S. on the path of economic suicide in service to the insane climate cult. Trump is now undoing literally all of it. This reversal is particularly remarkable because Trump barely got started on the project during his first term.
Something called the American Energy Alliance spent the Biden years compiling a list of all the initiatives of that group to suppress energy production. In all, their list had over 200 entries by the time Biden left office. Kevin Killough of Just the News on August 16 has a write-up on the AEA compilation. Since Trump has taken office for the second term, AEA has compiled a comparable list of all the reversals, now also in the range of 200 items. The topics covered range from reversing the finding the CO2 “endangers” human health and welfare, to undoing efforts to force closure of power plants running on coal and natural gas, to undoing automobile fuel economy standards, and much, much more. And add to the list reversing hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for useless wind and solar electricity generation.
…
Worst Trump Initiatives
(1) Declaring national emergencies.
In my view, one of the very worst things that Trump has been doing has been declaring a series of “national emergencies” in order to claim for himself various powers beyond those he would otherwise have.
Here is a Wikipedia compilation of all the various “national emergencies” that have been declared by all Presidents in U.S. history — the first of them having been declared by Woodrow Wilson back in 1917. Trump has declared some 8 national emergencies so far in his second term, in addition to 13 that he declared in his first term. The 8 so-called emergencies in just seven months is indeed the highest rate of emergency declarations of any president.
Several of the most recent “emergencies” are highly dubious. Four of them declare trade-related emergencies to support Trump’s tariff policies and trade negotiations. I’m sorry, but I don’t regard “large and persistent trade deficits” — the basis claimed in the one of the declarations that supports most of the tariff initiatives — as a bona fide emergency. Another of the declarations declares an “energy emergency.” The fact that bad government policy was undermining our energy economy does not make it a bona fide “emergency.” (Nearly all of the energy policy reversals taking place do not rely on the existence of any “emergency.”)
The remaining three emergency declarations deal with the situation of illegal crossings at the Southern border, the International Criminal Court, and the aggressive tactics of a judge in Brazil. Each of these at least has a decent claim to being a bona fide “emergency.”
The problem with declaring emergencies is that these things set precedents for incremental power accretion that subsequent Presidents are sure to follow.
To be fair to Trump on this issue, although he has declared an unusually high number of emergencies in the most recent seven months, other Presidents have not shied away from using these powers. The Wikipedia list states that some 90 national emergencies have been declared since Wilson got the ball rolling in 1917; and of the 90, only 42 have lapsed, while 48 are still in effect. Most of the 90 have occurred since Congress passed the National Emergencies Act of 1976. The emergency declarations that are still in effect mostly relate to imposing sanctions against bad foreign governments or terrorist organizations.
