Much achieved in 12 months by a president like no other

Trump haters are disingenuous in claiming Washington’s government shutdown is symptomatic of “acrimony, chaos and dysfunction” overwhelming the US administration. Successive US presidents, Republican and Democrat, have faced similar shutdowns over legislative arm-wrestles with congress. Barack Obama did in 2013 when, for 16 days, unfunded, non-essential government functions ground to a halt. So did Bill Clinton and others dating back to Gerald Ford in 1976.

The current shutdown, however, presents Donald Trump with a major challenge as he marks the first anniversary of his arrival in the White House. He must lose no time in negotiating an end to a crisis set to carve $US6.5 billion ($8.4bn) from US GDP each week it lasts. His claim to being a deal-maker-in-chief and the effects of his remarkable success in achieving the biggest tax reform seen in the US since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s is at stake. Currently, jobs are being created on a scale that eluded Mr Obama, with unemployment dropping to a 17-year low of 4.1 per cent. Mr Trump’s economic success in his first-year has also seen corporations such as Apple pledging to invest $US350bn over the next five years, create tens of thousands of new jobs and repatriate $US38bn to pay a huge tax bill rather than keep it offshore. This is the reality of the Trump presidency as he begins his second year — a reality his antagonists fail to acknowledge. Economic success is evident, too, in the unrealised forecasts by doomsayers of a devastating trade war with China. Instead, Mr Trump is due this week (events in Washington permitting) to become the first US president since Mr Clinton in 2000 to attend the Davos conference in Switzerland, significantly entering the sanctum sanctorum of the world’s leading “globalists” he railed against when he had the now-disgraced adviser Steve Bannon at his side. This is a promising sign that challenges the role Chinese leader Xi Jinping cast for himself at Davos last year as the champion of global free trade. As Cameron Stewart has reported, contrary to the lurid depictions in Michael Wolff’s dodgy book Fire and Fury, Mr Trump is emerging as a more traditional, conservative Republican president than his fiery populism during the 2016 campaign suggested.

After inheriting a raft of serious foreign policy problems, including the seemingly intractable issue of North Korean nuclear aggression, from the Obama years Mr Trump has, despite fears about isolationism, maintained Washington’s global commitments. His use of US air power, in concert with our own RAAF, broke the back of Islamic State as a force in Iraq and Syria. Wars against jihadists in Afghanistan and The Philippines have been intensified. He up-ended the Trans-Pacific Partnership, regrettably, but has retained a strategic interest in the Indo-Pacific region. As promised, he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. Unfortunately, the Wolff book’s tittle-tattle about alleged turmoil in the White House is informing many views of the President’s first year. For this, he deserves much of the blame. As The Wall Street Journal put it, “this is the price Mr Trump is paying for his reckless habit of tweeting before he thinks and squandering his credibility with false or uninformed statements”. An analysis of the tweets he has sprayed out in office shows the damage he has done in contradicting and undercutting policy announcements and making governing processes appear incoherent. His tweets did much to fuel the government shutdown; they almost scuttled congressional approval of vital intelligence gathering.

Mr Trump, who has changed perceptions of the US presidency, finishes his first year with the lowest approval rating for any president at this stage, 39 per cent, which is 10 points behind Mr Clinton. He appears set to lose Republican control of congress in November’s mid-term elections, which could open the door to impeachment moves over Russian meddling in the 2016 election. If he is to consolidate his considerable achievements, Mr Trump must forgo the unfiltered tweets and preoccupation with “fake news” that play into the hands of his haters.