To the dismay of the media and the ruling class, Donald Trump has mostly done a good job as president. The economy is up. Unemployment is down.
There has been a decided lack of new Bush/Obama-style military misadventures around the world.
It is, therefore, surprising that Trump's greatest failures are coming from the signature issue he ran on: immigration.
In recent weeks, Trump has sounded like Jeb Bush on immigration. The lack of progress on immigration has caused former supporter Ann Coulter to turn on Trump with an enumeration of his failings.
Here is my own list:
All of Obama's unlawful work authorizations for alien employment are still in place. The only one the Trump administration has taken any action on is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Trump tried to rescind that, but there were naturally court challenges across the country — and Trump's DHS undermined him by taking a dive in court, so DACA continues.
The wall is still a pipe dream. One has to wonder why Trump waited until Nancy Pelosi took charge of the House before he put up a fight. While the Republicans could improve the quality of their leadership in Congress by putting Homer Simpson in charge, it would still have been easier to get things done with Paul Ryan than with Pelosi.
Trump campaigned with Americans who had been replaced by H-1B guestworkers and promised he would put an end to that practice. There was an expectation that Trump would take aggressive regulatory action and would make a presidential declaration to ban replacing Americans with foreign workers.
Instead, the only action Trump has taken is a totally useless regulation that is so wimpy it could have come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Trump has established the National Council on the American Worker to "Ensure all Americans can benefit from the nation's historic economic boom and record low employment rates." Yet there are no representatives of American workers on the council.
Still worse, IBM puts out advertisements on its own corporate website saying that Americans need not apply for jobs in the United States. Yet the CEO of IBM is on Trump's Council for American workers — talk about letting the fox guard the chicken coop.
Who is advising Trump here?
Trump routinely meets with CEOs demanding more cheap foreign labor. Yet President Trump still has not met with American workers on that issue — you know, the folks who got him elected.
Illegal aliens are flooding the border. The local illegal alien pick-up point is in front of my yard (which then serves as the bathroom and garbage dump). The number of people standing out there each morning had been dwindling, but now their numbers are increasing again.
Trump has made one positive move on Immigration. President Trump installed, for the first time in the organization's history, competent management at USCIS. Prior to Trump, USCIS was a hangout for political hacks that ensured visa processing was a rubber-stamp operation. Now the people running USCIS ensure that someone actually checks what is on a visa petition before approving it.
This has put the open borders crowd in panic mode and they have responded by planting nearly identical stories in newspapers across the country about the scrutiny being applied to visas, but conveniently omitting any mention of the rampant fraud — stories that the mainstream media regurgitates without any independent investigation.
Trump has made two surprising managerial mistakes since he took office. First, he did not put in place managers to drive the legislative process. He needed to set a legislative agenda, find members of Congress to submit bills to implement that agenda, and then push for those bills. Instead, he relied on what passes as "leadership" among Republicans in Congress to push the agenda for him, with few results.
Second, Trump has blown it with staffing. He has left key positions unfilled, allowing the career government workers to run things. Trump has also allowed the Swamp to take over policy by putting people who are opposed to the agenda that got him elected in key positions.
Halfway through the presidential term, all the folks that Trump relied on to get him elected have disappeared and, along with them, the message that resonated with voters is fading.