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The Trump Tonic After Eight Years of Obama

January 25, 2018

Kimberly Crockett L'87 applauds President Trump's curtailing of the regulatory state and reversing of executive orders issued by the prev...
Kimberly Crockett L'87 applauds President Trump's curtailing of the regulatory state and reversing of executive orders issued by the previous administration.
One year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Kimberly Crockett L’87, of the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank that advocates for conservative and free market principles, finds much to like.

There’s been the Reagan Revolution, the Obama Coalition, and now the Trump Effect.

“I think what’s exciting about the Trump effect, the guy is not looking for approval. He doesn’t care what the New York Times or the Washington Post think. He’s not afraid of them. He’s going in there (the White House and federal bureaucracy) and trying to clean house,” said Kimberly Crockett L’87, vice president, senior policy fellow & general counsel at the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank that advocates for conservative and free market principles.

One year into Donald Trump’s presidency, Crockett finds much to like: a roll back of regulations, an America First foreign policy, restrictions on immigration, and the appointment of conservative judges — from her point of view, a necessary pendulum swing to the right and a bracing tonic after eight years of Obama.

Some of the President’s biggest accomplishments are hardly visible to the average person but are significant nonetheless. Crockett applauds every time the President curtails the regulatory state and reverses executive orders issued by the previous administration. She said the Trump administration is doing “really bold things,” such as taking control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Crockett considers an extra-constitutional agency that provides scant help to consumers and concentrates more power in Washington. In addition, using a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act, the administration had, as of June, overturned 14 Obama-era regulations on everything from the environment to guns.

Trump is also quietly reshaping the federal judiciary, taking it in a more conservative direction highlighted by the elevation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court and the appointment of 12 judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals. “He gets an A on judicial appointments,” Crockett said. She praised President Trump for taking recommendations from Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society. (Crockett co-founded the Penn Law chapter in 1984.) Stocking the bench with Trump appointees, she said, will improve the odds that the administration’s interpretations of executive power and regulatory reform will hold up if challenged in court.

In the first months of the Trump presidency there were legal challenges to proposed travel bans, and protests surrounding a crackdown on immigration. Arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants soared during the first year of the Trump administration. Border crossings were at their lowest level since 1971, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Despite this downward trend, Minnesota and other states are buckling under the strain of providing services to immigrants, including refugees, Crockett said. (Minnesota is the top destination for refugees in the United States on a per capita basis.)

“It’s just not a great time to say, ‘Hey, why don’t we take 110,000 new refugees every year,’ which is what Obama did when he was leaving office. Trump has cut it down to 45,000. Under Bush, by the way, it was 50,000 a year.”

As Crockett sees it, President Trump’s hard stance on both legal and illegal immigration is of a piece with his America First foreign policy, under which he’s rewriting the rules. With his direct style, President Trump has made it clear to foreign leaders that he can’t be pushed around. He will go his own way as demonstrated by his decisions to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact with Asian nations and other countries, and the Paris Climate Agreement.  

“Why hasn’t America always been first? We have this idea that because we’re the superpower in the world that our president or the federal government is supposed to look out for somebody other than Americans. It took Trump to say, no, I represent Americans, not Europeans or whomever.”

An outsider, President Trump got elected on the promise that he would shake things up. As a businessman, he would boost the economy and represent working people. “I think people are feeling overwhelmed and when they hear ”Make America Great Again,” what they hear is we’re going to have a president where I’m the priority and he’s going to help me get back to work again with a good paying job,” Crockett said.

Indeed, the stock market is at a record high, consumer confidence is high, unemployment is at 4.1 percent and GDP growth was 3.3 percent in the third quarter.

What Crockett hears is a president who is committed to tax reform so people can keep more of their money. She hears a president who believes that a proliferation of rules is strangling the economy. She hears a president who wants judges to follow rather than make law. 

 “For those of us who think that limited government leads to freer citizens and greater prosperity for everybody, we’re cheering,” Crockett said.

Read more perspectives on the first year of the Trump presidency.