During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to enter Washington D.C. and get major things done.
Trump promised to tackle issues confronting the United States both domestically and abroad and said he would use the same successful negotiation tactics he has used for decades to fundamentally change the nation’s capital. He would strike deals with Congress, with Democrats, with world leaders, anybody he needed in order to make America great again.
Specifically, Trump said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, and construct a border wall.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson argued that Trump failed to deliver on each of those promises, Breitbart reports.
Here’s more:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign promises.
“His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
“I’ve come to believe that Trump’s role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does,” said Carlson, whose new book Ship of Fools is a New York Times bestseller.
“I don’t think he’s capable. I don’t think he’s capable of sustained focus,” he added. “I don’t think he understands the system. I don’t think the Congress is on his side. I don’t think his own agencies support him. He’s not going to do that.”
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Trump has achieved historic success in his first couple years in office, like the appointment of two United States Supreme Court justices and he passed the largest tax reform bill in decades, but he has also missed the center of his campaign platform.
Carlson also credited Trump for being a conversation starter, for bringing previously unmentioned issues like illegal immigration, the border, NATO and others to the forefront of political discussions.
“I think Trump’s role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters,” Carlson said, per the report. “We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It’s a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all.”
“Trump asked basic questions like ‘Why don’t our borders work?’ ‘Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?’ Or my favorite of all, ‘What’s the point of NATO?’,” the Fox News host continued. “The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven’t existed in 27 years, so what is the point?”
“These are obvious questions that no one could answer,” he added.
Carlson said there was work to be done in Washington, specifically by President Trump who is seeking re-election to win back Middle America:
“If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There’s nothing. They have not recovered,” he said.
Rural America, he thought at the time, “is really falling apart” and yet nobody in Washington seemed to understand that. In the end, “the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that’s very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy.”
Trump, on the other hand, “could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing,” Carlson said.