That Donald Trump transformed himself from property developer, reality television star and owner of the Miss Universe franchise into the 45th president of the United States seems no less bemusing more than three years on than it did on November 8, 2016.

Since he entered the presidential race in 2015, the Trump zeitgeist has shaken up the political establishment in both the Republican and Democratic parties, and left US policy watchers, foreign leaders and international market traders scratching their heads. His pronouncements via Twitter have done little to clarify matters.

Following his presidential triumph, anticipating how he might behave, what policies or actions he might prioritize next, has become a primary occupation for many of us. Yet in his fourth year, he is still behind his Oval Office desk and has managed to do many of the things he promised to do when a presidential candidate.

Now, in the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, he faces the most important test yet of his presidency, one which no candidate would have predicted.

With the US presidential and congressional elections now only seven months away it is a good time to separate the man from the myth and work out what solid achievements he has made behind the bluster.

Allow me to demystify Trump. If you want to know what Trump is going to do, just listen to what he says. In particular, listen to what he has said he intended to do since he was a presidential candidate. A good place to start is with his Contract with the American Voter, released in October 2016. In the document, which is readily available online, Trump and his team outlined a 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.

Considered against the backdrop of Trumps first 100 days in office, the contract seems gimmicky. When viewed as a roadmap for Trumps first term, however, it becomes hard to ignore how closely he and his administration have worked to tick items off this list.

On domestic policy, Trump committed in the contract to reducing regulation. By the White House account, for every new rule it has enacted the Trump administration has cut eight and a half regulations, reducing regulatory costs by an estimated $50 billion.

Trump also promised to lift restrictions on the production of US energy reserves, and in office he has rewritten the Clean Power Plan to stimulate the coal industry and offered plans to ease methane emission limits, roll back offshore drilling safety restrictions and expand offshore drilling. Trump committed separately to restarting the Keystone Pipeline and similar energy infrastructure projects, which his administration has taken steps to advance.

Trump also proposed various actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law. To restore security, Trump committed to various immigration reforms including cancelling all federal funding for sanctuary cities, which he did by a January 2017 executive action that has been challenged in the courts.

He also pledged to remove illegal immigrants and suspend immigration from terror-prone regions, a measure enacted through the 2017 travel ban which was extended in 2020. He also announced his intention to build a border wall with Mexico, more than 90 miles of which were reported to be completed by December 2019, and which the Trump administration repeatedly appropriated funds for.

On restoring the constitutional rule of law, Trump vowed to cancel Barack Obamas unconstitutional executive actions and has since rolled back a number of Obama initiatives including those on climate change and protections for transgender individuals in the military. He has also nominated Supreme Court justices from a list of anti-abortion candidates prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation: Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

Finally, Trump pledged changes to the tax system which included a reduction in the corporate tax rate, decreases in the number of individual tax brackets and deductions for childcare, all measures incorporated into the 2017 tax overhaul.

On foreign policy, Trump laid out plans to: withdraw from Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he did almost immediately upon taking office; cancel payments to the UN climate change programmes he withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017; renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement Trump signed the revised USMCA trade deal in January 2020; and rebuild the military and end the cap on spending Trump has overseen increased defence spending, including in his fiscal year 2021 budget.

Unsurprisingly, Trumps contract extensively covered trade, the linchpin of his America First foreign policy. In it, he promised to direct the Treasury Secretary to label China a currency manipulator, something carried out in August 2019 and subsequently reversed in January 2020 before the two parties signed their Phase One trade deal.

Trump also committed to identifying all foreign trading abuses affecting US workers and take action to end them.

Between the global tariffs on solar panels and washing machines and later steel and aluminium, the Section 301 investigations imposing tariffs on an increasing range of Chinese goods, or proposed tariffs on Mexican imports, Trump has aggressively pursued perceived trade abuses and imbalances.

Whether one agrees with Trumps policies or not, his administration has accomplished much of what it set out to.

And Trump knows this. His re-election campaign as previewed in his State of the Union Address on February 4 will be this: Trump has kept his promises and the economy and the country are all the better for it. In fact, his re-election website is promisekept.com where the headline has changed from Making America Great Again to Keeping America Great.

When trying to anticipate what Trump will prioritize next, the obvious place to start is with what is left to be ticked off that October 2016 contract list.

At home, this looks like: additional immigration reforms continuing to build the southern border wall with Mexico, further visa restrictions and asylum curbs; more environmental deregulation; movement on his long-delayed 2018 infrastructure proposal; educational reforms; a proposed Restoring Community Safety Act targeting crime reduction; and perhaps taking another shot at repealing Obamacare.

On foreign policy, what is left on Trumps list includes more trade action, particularly pursuing more bilateral trade deals. This potentially includes a US-UK free trade deal, which Steven Mnuchin, the US Treasury Secretary, indicated was a priority when speaking at Chatham House in January, as well as an agreement with Europe. These will probably be phased deals, similar to the Phase One trade deal with China.

With any movement on trade arrangements, the administration will probably rely on another standby of Trumps presidency, executive action, including on tariffs and sanctions. This could include raising the volume on Twitter on car tariffs in the run-up to potential US-European trade negotiations. Similarly, threats of World Trade Organization action or tariffs on British goods are likely to increase as part of any US-UK trade negotiations, especially if Britain imposes a technology tax similar to Frances.

Longer-term objectives such as a sweeping infrastructure overhaul or a Phase Two China deal will be left until after the November elections, if Trump is returned to office.

What matters most for him in the run-up to his re-election bid is the strength of domestic economic indicators such as jobs and unemployment levels, GDP growth rates, the stock market and wages. All of these have been thrown into the air by the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis.

Given the outsized role that the health of the economy will play for his re-election, the potential economic, health and collective fallout of a protracted outbreak of COVID-19 in the US is the type of low probability, high impact event that could pose a real challenge to Trumps re-election.

Polling in March suggests that Americans remain split on the Trump administrations handling of the outbreak; even as cases of coronavirus continue to rise unabated, the Dow Jones Industrial Average vacillates daily after ending its longest ever bull market, presidential primary elections are postponed, hospitals and households face supply shortages, and all aspects of life go virtual.

Whether appropriate or not, comparisons with 9/11 have been frequent. In the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks in 2001, George W Bush saw his approval rating spike to as high as 90 per cent.

Now, in 2020, after an initial slow response that sought more to downplay the risks from the virus than to take action to contain its spread, the governments emergency economic stimulus plan will be the largest in US history at US$2 trillion.

How effective and effectively implemented these measures are including direct cash handouts, small business support, aid for airlines and other severely distressed industries as well as funds for election security will determine whether Trump sees his own rally-around-the-flag effect or whether the political toll of the coronavirus outbreak costs Trump his re-election. The advantage of being an incumbent president in US politics is real, however. During the period from 1788 to 2004, the in-office party has retained the White House two thirds of the time when running incumbent candidates.

The coronavirus crisis aside, one other aspect of Trumps Contract with the American Voter cannot be ignored. In it he committed himself to six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC. These measures proposed both a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government and a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.

Yet it was the administrations involvement of a foreign government in the electoral process that lay at the heart of the move to make Trump only the third US president to face impeachment. US officials in and around the Trump administration including Trump himself lobbied the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for compromising information on Joe Biden, the former vice president and Trumps likely rival in the November presidential election, and withheld US military aid that had already been authorized by Congress.

In the final analysis, what Trump has done politically cannot be divorced from how he has done it.

While assessing Trumps actions on trade or immigration or deregulation, we cannot ignore his modus operandi of expansive executive authority, erosion of institutions, blurring of lines between the executive and judicial branch and deep questions about Americas reliability as an ally and its continued engagement in the world.

Trumps decision in February to pardon or commute the sentences of a number of individuals imprisoned for fraud and corruption, is just the latest, revealing example.

We may be able to demystify Trumps priorities by listening to the messages he has sent since he was a presidential candidate. Whether this provides any comfort will depend on how one feels about his objectives and the ways he crosses them off his list.

Continued here:

Forget the tweets, read the contract - Chatham House