Trump marks the feeble 'end' of the nation's King-President experiment: Opinion

Conservative court watcher Sarah Isgur tells the New York Times that Trump has made a lot of noise but accomplished very little long term in his second term.

There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that is wholly unique,” Isgur said on the Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast. “What Donald Trump has done is turn the amp up to 11 on places that his predecessors have had built on in the past.”

Isgur cited former President Barack Obama referring to his “pen and phone moment.”

“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward,” Obama told reporters, likely in response to Republican recalcitrance and opposition at the legislative level.

“In a lot of ways can see Trump doing a much bigger pen and a much bigger phone, and really having all of government by executive action,” said Isgur. “In another lens, you could go all the way back to the Progressive Era — you know, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Era, where they think Congress is a bunch of dum-dums coming from wherever. What if we did government by experts in the executive branch?”

“So, in another sense, Trump is the endpoint of this 100-year experiment that we’ve been running of: ‘Meh, let’s just have the presidency do it all,’” Isgur said.

But when asked about Trump’s personal culmination of America’s executive-dominated “endpoint,” she said there was very little to show for it.

“I say it’s an endpoint because it is so obviously failed,” said Isgur. “He has failed to implement any of his major policy initiatives through executive order in any realistic sense. You think about Alien Enemies Act, federalizing the National Guard, worldwide tariffs, birthright citizenship. These are the main pillars of Donald Trump’s policy presidency, the substantive aspects of it. And they’ve all failed with the exception of birthright citizenship — which is going to.