But what, in the real world, not the make-believe world of campaigns, has he accomplished? Nothing legislatively. He claims to have signed a record number of bills, but they mostly consist of naming buildings & parks, and other ceremonial items, as well as bureaucratic tweaks, and about a third were bills reversing Obama-era regulations. "So", his supporters might reply, "he's signing a lot of executive orders since we have a do-nothing, ineffective, Congress". But the executive orders are mainly reversals of Obama administration regulation as well. Executive orders regarding immigration have been held up in the courts.
A big part of this destructive path is that he simply has no idea how legislation works. He has no idea what the relationship between the Congress and the President is. This is what you get when you get someone steeped in New York media culture, who was the star of a "reality" show and who is the top dog at a huge tentaculer collection of interlocking businesses. In that world the CEO is the king, the emperor, the "one man" in "one man, one vote", everyone else is an employee. When you're President there are people that you can order around, and you can get two scoops of ice cream, but members of Congress don't work for the President. He has to work with them, not demand that they do his bidding. He also has no idea how complex legislation has to be. One of the reasons that he was legally able to cancel subsidies to insurance companies to help them cover low-income people is that, while the subsidies were written into the ACA, the funding mechanism was not. This small oversight left a vulnerable hole in the law. He doesn't understand that a loophole, while it can be a purposely crafted exception to a law, is just as often an interpretation that no one thought of when they were writing the law. I've seen this many times in the short time that I have been working in government.
His destructive tendencies are not just an outgrowth of his ignorance. His default action when questioned is to attack, whether it's the Democrats, his own party, foreign leaders, the press, or not unusually, his own cabinet and White House staff. Another default setting seems to be to lie big as often as possible. He lies when he doesn't know the answer, he lies when he knows the answer but doesn't want to appear stupid, he lies as an opening gambit to negotiation. All of this lying and second guessing about when he is or isn't lying sows chaos all around him. Look at his statements on North Korea, Congress and the media, chaos is the new normal.
We have elected a President with no plan other than to tear down...everything.
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