Just like every President before him, Donald Trump made hundreds of policy proposals during his campaign. Now that he has won the election, his goal will be finding ways in which to implement these ideas. While some of his thoughts were downright horrifying, others would be excellent. These are the top five promises President Trump hopefully keeps.
1. Repeal Obamacare
Trump will significantly rebuke the American history of big government expansions if he is able to work alongside the Republican House and Senate to repeal the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, more infamously known as Obamacare. Just like Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump made the repeal of Obamacare one of the centerpieces of his campaign. However, also like Romney, Trump previously supported single-payer healthcare and seems to now be backtracking on his original promise of repeal. If Trump were to renege on this promise, Obamacare would likely join Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as big government programs which Republicans rallied against but eventually came to tolerate.
2. Audit the Fed
Viewed by many as an attempt to appeal to more libertarian-leaning voters, Trump has on many occasions criticized the Federal Reserve. In mid-September, he said of Fed Chair Janet Yellen that “I think she is very political and to a certain extent, I think she should be ashamed of herself.” In his final campaign video, he called her part of the “political establishment” which has “bled our country dry.” Beyond Yellen personally, he has criticized the Fed on substance as well. In February, after the Senate voted on the long-anticipated “Audit the Fed” bill, Trump chastised Ted Cruz for missing the vote, saying “It is so important to audit the Federal Reserve, and yet Ted Cruz missed the vote on the bill that would allow this to be done.”
3. Term Limits
One of Trump’s last campaign strategies was to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., eliminating unnecessary bureacuracy and career politicians. This included his embrace of Congressional term limits, which have long been a talking point for conservatives and libertarians. The most recent push was in the early 1990s, when eight states voted to approve term limits for their members of Congress. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states did not have this power and that therefore, these initiatives were invalid. When Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to become the House majority in 1995, his “Contract with America” included term limits as well. A Constitutional Amendment was proposed, but it got only a bare majority (227-204), rather than the necessary two-thirds supermajority of 290 votes.
4. Tax Cuts
Of all of his promises which are hopefully implemented, this is the most likely to come to fruition. Trump has promised one of the largest tax cuts in American history. Historically, Republican Presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan have cut taxes dramatically, which has made libertarians very happy. However, the issue comes in that conservatives also seem to have a hard time finding programs to cut and often also increase funding for defense programs, thus massively increasing the deficit. Nonetheless, Scott Greenberg, analyst with the Center for Federal Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation states that it is “very hard to imagine a single tax payer who wouldn’t be paying less in taxes under the Trump plan.”
5. Non-Interventionism
Trump most prominently stands out from the rest of the Republican Party in that he supports an “America First” foreign policy, generally urging non-interventionism. Though he consistently asserted that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, his past statements make this suspect at best. However, he at the very least made a more coherent argument against that conflict somewhat early in the invasion, similar to some Democrats like Hillary Clinton. On a more broad spectrum, he has publicly advocated that “If I become president, the era of nation building will be brought to a very swift and decisive end.” Discouragingly, some former Bush foreign policy advisers could be on their way into his Administration. He also made some problematic statements on the campaign trail about launching the country into war. Regardless, one can only hope that unlike President Obama, Trump stays true to his word in ending American pursuit of a neoconservative foreign policy.