The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
Staff, Wire Reports
Posted: Sunday, January 21, 2018 07:30 PM
OPED: 2017 A Great Year For President Trump, Republicans Even Though Media Won't Ever Admit It
When congressional Republicans joined President Trump for a tax bill celebration at the White House just before Christmas, a triumphant Mitch McConnell began ticking off the president’s first-year accomplishments.
The boasts from the Kentucky Republican, who's had a rocky relationship with Trump at times, underscored how – despite the internal squabbles that captivated the media – the Trump administration has given his party plenty to crow about in 2017.
From the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to regulation rollbacks to Wall Street gains to the passage of the tax bill and the routing of ISIS in the Middle East – as McConnell put it, “This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration.”
To be sure, there have been plenty of campaign promises that Trump did not fulfill in his first year: a wall has not yet been built on the border with Mexico, ObamaCare hasn’t been repealed (though the individual mandate has) and an infrastructure package hasn’t yet passed in Congress. Meanwhile, Trump's White House has been hampered at times by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and daily drama, often the result of tweets fired off by the president himself.
“This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. (AP)
But Republicans inside and outside of the White House contend that the media, which hammer Trump on every misstep, aren't giving him due credit for the 2017 gains his administration has made in a combative political environment.
A senior administration official said that while tax reform has been widely described as Trump’s first major legislative win, they have counted 81 pieces of Trump-backed legislation that are now law.
“That's in addition to 15 congressional review acts whereby the president took a look at laws that were passed without the benefit of congressional review, and decided to reverse or undo them,” the official said.
Before leaving for Florida for the holidays, Trump took to Twitter to tout his administration's “long & beautiful list” of accomplishments. He predicted the “Fake Mainstream Media will NEVER talk about our accomplishments in their end of year reviews.”
