[AlexTWithBeard]

Just off the top of my head:

- made hospitals disclose healthcare prices

- cleaned up asylum rules

- banned Chinese equipment from 5G networks

- enacted criminal justice reform

And the most important: he's the only recent president who didn't start a new war. That alone would be enough to write his name in golden letters.

[camgunz]

These are correct, though I would quibble about the "new war" thing a little. Obama pulled the number of troops deployed overseas down sharply, and they increased slightly under Trump [0].

I would also say the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19 is one of the worst in the world in terms of outcomes. It's hard to imagine any other reasonably possible president--including Republicans--doing so badly, and this is solely because they chose to politicize mask wearing. It was a historic blunder that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions if not trillions of dollars. Not even the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can compare, which is a wild thing to say.

Second, Trump's agenda was largely ineffectual. He didn't significantly alter immigration policy, his trade wars failed, and his tax cuts failed to produce significant economic growth (though they did increase the deficit). Diplomatically his administration was a complete failure, and it's hard to not lay some of the blame for Ukraine at his feet--whether its his weakening of NATO, his strong support for Putin, or his attempts to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless they helped him tar a political rival.

Finally, I would point to opportunity costs. Presidents can't tread water; they need to make progress over their terms on multiple time scales. While the administration was pursuing a poorly targeted agenda that would ultimately fail anyway, they were ignoring some other serious problems: climate change, US election integrity, labor relations, tech monopolies, prescription drug costs, student debt, housing costs, etc. The Trump administration slept on all of these, putting us four years behind. That's... well it's just very bad.

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

[Toxygene]

> he's the only recent president who didn't start a new war

Not for a lack of trying. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani was authorized by Trump and led to several direct attacks on each other and only stopped after Iran accidentally shot down a commercial passenger plane originating from their own country.

[_8j50]

He is the first republican in a long time that didn't start a war only because there were already two undrerway and his generals stopped him from starting wars. He was a DC outsider so he didn't know the war starting protocol I guess?

[AlexTWithBeard]

Would be good if our next president doesn't know the war starting protocol as well.

[_8j50]

Not if there is a good reason to wage a war. Everyone complains about wars but every war since vietnam had widespread public support at the time it was started.

[midoridensha]

That's not a good reason to start a war. The Iraq War (2003, not the Gulf War of the 90s) had widespread public support because the CIA fabricated evidence of WMDs to create that support.

[saiya-jin]

that 5G ban was overall trend in all west, certainly not something Trump made(TM). In fact, it would look utterly incompetent for him if all western democracies rejected Huawei 5G hardware apart from US, given his anti-chinese stance.

Some points look nice and sane, but I don't know details. But there are maybe 10,000 different aspects of government, its impossible to not compile list of positive achievements for any president/politician.

I think what Trump opponents have much more beef with is the list of things he did wrong/didn't do but should. That defines politician much more than positive items. Same as person-person interaction in general - its not that important how many positive aspects the other has rather than the negative ones, they define overall tone and compatibility much more.