What did we get for four years of Donald Trump?

Since 2016, countless conservatives struggled to weigh Trump’s obvious deficiencies as a leader against the fact that he was far more likely to implement conservative policies than any Democrat would have been. Now that he’s lost reelection, it’s time to take stock of what he delivered.

Simply put, if you look at the Trump presidency purely through the lens of conservative versus liberal policy prefer­ences, it was a clear improvement over what would have happened under a President Hillary Clinton. The Donald performed spectacularly in some ways and unimpressively in others, but he nearly always moved policy rightward to some degree, when Clinton would have moved policy leftward. I can’t tell anyone how to weigh this fact against Trump’s downsides — for the record, I voted third party myself in both 2016 and 2020 — but any conservative has to place some big victories on the “pro” side of the ledger.

Trump consolidated his support among the Republican base by adopting the standard conservative line on “dea­l­breaker” issues such as the Supreme Court, abortion, and guns. One can debate how sincere his commitment to any of these issues was, but in practice, he kept his promises.

In a Supreme Court justice, conser­vatives want someone who will apply the law as written and steadfastly resist any attempt to impose left-wing policies from the bench. A willingness to roll back the worst examples of judicial activism from past decades, especially Roe v. Wade, is also a plus. This could have been a major weakness for Trump, who’s shown no signs of a well-developed judicial philosophy and once suggested that his lefty sister, a retired federal judge, would make a fine justice. Ultimately, however, he outsourced the decision to serious conservative legal thinkers, putting together a list of possibilities with their help and releasing it publicly. In four years he got the chance to nominate three justices, and Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are among the best choices any Republican president could have made. Their tenure will long outlast Trump’s, and while their goal will not be to advance conservative policy per se, they absolutely will preserve the original meaning of the Constitution and interpret laws to mean what they say. The Right dodged a bullet in having these seats filled by Trump and not by Clinton.

Most important, it seems the Second Amendment is safe and Roe is in danger. And Trump advanced these two culture-war issues in other ways as well. He reinstated and expanded the “Mexico City policy” keeping federal funds from overseas organizations that per­form abortions, and he stopped Title X family-planning funds from going to groups in the U.S. that perform or promote abortions as well. After some waffling in the wake of the Parkland massacre, he main­tained his position against major new gun-control measures, too.

Trump also embraced traditional con­servative policy preferences on health care and many aspects of economic policy. Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace Obamacare during the first half of Trump’s term despite months of trying was, no doubt, an embarrassment. But the presi­dent dramatically remade the law nonethe­less, signing the repeal of the individual mandate and making it easier, through executive action, to buy non-Obamacare-compliant plans off the exchanges. If you don’t like your Obamacare plan, you don’t have to keep it anymore.

Trump racked up some further victories against regulation — if not as many as he and his surrogates sometimes claim. The page count of the Code of Federal Regulations has been growing almost constantly for more than half a century, but under Trump it held roughly steady, and by any measure Trump has regulated less than other recent presidents.

He nixed high-profile rules such as the Clean Power Plan and fast-rising fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles, and he backed out of the Paris climate agreement. His National Labor Relations Board undid many of the previous administration’s efforts to tilt the labor-law playing field in favor of unions and against business. In 2017 he teamed up with congressional Republicans to kill 14 recent regulations using the Congressional Review Act, saving the affected industries tens of billions of dollars and millions of hours of paperwork.

A more competent administration could have done more, especially to bullet­­proof Trump’s rule changes against legal challenges, many of which are still on­going. But there’s a clear difference be­tween what happened under Trump and what could have happened under Clinton.

Trump also, of course, signed the 2017 tax cuts, which reduced the intrusion of the government into our pocketbooks and finally made the U.S. corporate rate com­peti­tive (indeed, remarkably low) in an international context. The law increases the deficit, and we on the deficit-hawk side of the conservative spectrum had our reservations about it for that reason. But tax-cutting is clearly a victory of main­stream conservative policy.

Importantly, some of Trump’s other policy preferences are at least as populist as they are conservative. The more free-market wing of the Republican Party may not like what he did on immigration and especially trade, but no one can say it came as a surprise.

Despite the presence of those free-market enthusiasts, the GOP is indisputably the party of immigration restrictionists, and Trump did much to reduce immi­gration levels. As Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has detailed for National Review Online, the immigrant population grew by 650,000 a year from 2010 to 2017, but by only 200,000 a year from 2017 to 2019, despite the strong economy in the latter years. As Camarota summarized,

some of the policies that have likely slowed immigration include reducing refugee resettlement, tightening public-charge rules [regarding immigrant wel­fare use], forcing Mexico and Central American countries to give asylum seekers safe haven, increased border fencing, and more worksite enforcement. The efforts to end the administrative amnesties of DACA and Temporary Protected Status may have caused some illegal immigrants to leave and dis­couraged others from coming, as well.

Meanwhile, on trade, Trump slapped tariffs on numerous goods, scuttled America’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and renegotiated NAFTA. As free-marketeers would predict, it seems unlikely that pro­tectionism was good for American workers and consumers on average: Studies show that every job saved came at immense cost, including lost jobs elsewhere. Trade is a smudge on Trump’s conservative record, albeit one he promised in advance and one that does hold some appeal to the GOP’s populist wing.

Again, I can’t tell anyone how to weigh Trump’s victories against his many, many failures, including those in policy areas that implicate basic competence and decency rather than partisan loyalty: the slapdash approach to COVID-19, the family-separation horror, the constant stream of insane comments, the authoritarian posturing, the insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, the flirtations with racism, all of it. A better Republican president might have avoided these failings while accomplish­ing every­thing Trump did and more, especially shepherding health-care reform, more COVID relief, and perhaps even an immi­gration deal through Con­gress. We also can’t forget that all the policies Trump changed through execu­tive action, which are a decent proportion of the above, can be changed back just as easily by the next president (or in some cases scuttled in court).

So my claim here is a narrow one: On issues where conservatives want the gov­ern­ment to do one thing and liberals want it to do another, Trump consistently sided with conservatives. He came through especially well on the Supreme Court, which plays an outsize role in the gun and abortion debates, and also made progress on health care, taxes, regulation, and immi­gration. These accomplishments aren’t every­thing, but they are important.