Trump Promise Tracker

Fact Checker analysis:

There are various ways one could try to count whether this promise has been achieved, not all of which would support the administration, but there is little doubt the president has attacked regulations. Under the administration’s regulatory agenda, the White House budget website in 2018 showed 498 pending actions are listed as deregulatory and 133 as regulatory, as defined by the executive order. That’s a ratio of nearly 4 to 1. But the numbers shrink dramatically when you search only for “economically significant” actions: 32 deregulatory and 20 regulatory. That’s less than 2 to 1. Minor deregulatory actions include such items as allowing the importation of fresh pomelo fruit from Thailand and pine shoot beetle deregulation. Still, for the purposes of this promise tracker, we will label this as kept.

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On Jan. 28, Trump signed an order that he said would result in a lifetime ban on administration officials lobbying for foreign governments.

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On Jan. 22, 2017, Trump said he will begin renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement when he meets with the leaders of Canada and Mexico. He did not mention withdrawing from the deal, under the Article 2204 clause of the agreement, if he did not get what he wanted. On April 26, Trump tweeted that he had spoken the presidents of Mexico and Canada about renegotiating NAFTA. "I agreed, subject to the fact that if we do not reach a fair deal for all, we will then terminate NAFTA," he wrote. This appears to fulfill his promise to announce this threat, so we will label this as kept. Eventually, the Trump administration negotiated an updated version of the trade pact, relabeled the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement.

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On Jan. 23, 2017, Trump signed an order withdrawing from the TPP.

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This was a promise broken at first -- and then suddenly kept. On April 12, 2017, Trump announced he would not label China a currency manipulator -- a promise he had pledged to do on his first day in office. Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he had changed his mind because China is not currently manipulating his currency, though that was already apparent during the election season. But then on Aug. 5, 2019, he tweeted that China was manipulating its currency after the yuan fell below 7 to the dollar after Trump announced additional tariffs. The Treasury Department a few hours later applied the largely symbolic label. (In 2020, Trump dropped the designation ahead of a trade-deal signing, but we will keep this as a promise kept.)

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Trump administration officials have taken action against what it described as foreign trading abuses, with Trump quick to impose sanction or levy tariffs.

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On March 31, Trump signed executive order 13785, which established enhanced procedures for imposing antidumping and countervailing duties for trading abuses. This does not quite match the promise but it is relatively close, so we will mark it as kept.

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On March 28, 2017, Trump signed an order that instructed federal regulators to rewrite key Obama-era rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions — namely the Clean Power Plan, which was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s electric plants. It also sought to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing and remove the requirement that federal officials consider the impact of climate change when making decisions. Trump's tax bill includes an historic measure to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

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On Jan. 24, 2017, Trump signed an order clearing the way for the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines to move forward. He also signed a memorandum that would expedite environmental reviews of "high-priority" infrastructure projects

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On Jan. 24, 2017, Trump told reporters: "I'll be making my decision [on a Supreme Court justice] this week and we'll be announcing next week." We will monitor to see whether he chooses a nominee from the list of 20 possibilities released during the campaign. On Jan. 31, Trump announced the selection of Neil Gorsuch, one of the names on his original list. Gorsuch was ultimately confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 54-45.

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The Department of Homeland Security issued memos that considerably broaden the pool of undocumented immigrants prioritized for removal, including those who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.” The crackdown has not yet rounded up 2 million criminal illegal immigrants -- about 800,000 people have been deported in Trump's first three years, fewer than under Obama in the same period -- and some experts doubt there are that many in any case. But Trump's immigration enforcement has been aggressive.

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The tax bill signed into law by Trump allows corporations to repatriate assets at 8 percent and liquid assets at 15.5 percent. That's an average slightly higher than 10 percent but it is close enough we will mark this as kept.

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Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent on aluminum products on March 23, 2017, saying the imports threatened national security. He also imposed large tariffs on China and often threatened tariffs on other nations.

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Trump in June 2017 signed an executive order that ordered the Labor Department to roughly double to $200 million the taxpayer money spent on learn-to-earn programs. The money would come from existing job training programs.

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Trump, in a 2019 presidential memo, declared visa overstay rates “unacceptably high” and calling them a “widespread problem.” On the basis of a Homeland Security report, he instructed federal agencies to consider action against countries that have business and tourism travelers — using the popular B1 and B2 visas — who overstay at a rate higher than 10 percent. (Twenty countries have overstay rates higher than 10 percent, according to the Homeland Security report. Except for Syria and Nigeria, these countries accounted for fewer than 1,000 overstayers each.) Trump gave the State Department four months to consult with Homeland Security officials and the attorney general to recommend sanctions, which he said could include suspending or limiting visas for those countries.

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On Feb. 9, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to form a task force on violent crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has from time to time announced that he is following recommendations from the task force, but DOJ has never released information on it or a list of members. But the task force was created, so we will consider this a promise kept.

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In February, Trump signed three executive orders that called for action against transnational gangs. The Justice Department designated MS-13 as a priority for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. A six-week operation from March 26 to May 6 was the largest gang surge to date by Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, and it netted 1,378 arrests across the country, according to ICE.

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The defense sequester was part of the 2011 Budget Control Act, a bill designed to force cuts if Congress did not pass budgets reducing the deficit. Trump and Congress originally suspended the sequester for 2018 and 2019 but technically kept it in place. But the threat of the sequester was finally eliminated in the the budget agreement in the summer of 2019 when the budget caps were lifted in fiscal year 2021, the final year they were in effect.

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On Nov. 16, 2017, the Senate backed Trump’s expanded vision for the military when lawmakers sent him a defense policy bill, authorizing an increased military budget. The budget, which tops Trump’s initial proposal, includes funding for new equipment and strengthened nuclear defenses. The elimination of the defense sequester allowed for a big increase in military funding in 2018 and 2019.

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In 2018, Trump signed the bipartisan VA Mission Act, which expanded access for veterans to VA-funded care in the private sector. (This built on a law passed under Barack Obama.) Rules established under the law took effect in 2019, with the VA paying veterans to see non-VA doctors if they have to wait longer than 20 days or drive more than 30 minutes for primary or mental healthcare at a VA facility. For specialty care, they can see private doctors at VA expense if they have to wait longer than 28 days or drive more than an hour to see a VA provider.

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The presidential executive order that resulted in the travel ban established new protocols for evaluating how robust the screening could be for every country in the world, and established new benchmarks that countries had to meet to avoid having their citizens denied access. The administration also has issued directives to include social media as part of vetting; the State Department in 2019 began requiring certain applicants for admission to disclose their social media accounts, though policy faces a legal challenge.