The Year in Review: Assessing President Trump's First Year in Office

Today is January 20th, and that means that Donald Trump has been in office for a year. Yes, we're still alive. No, none of us thought that he would still be in office at this point. And yes, he shouldn't have stepped foot into the White House in the first place.

Now, if you're a Trump opposer, you might be expecting a story about how horrible he is. If you're a Trump supporter, you're probably thinking, "Oh, look. More snowflake fake news propaganda from a triggered libtard who can't get over the fact that he lost. GOD BLESS PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!"

But I'll just be reviewing Trump for the past year on just a few things that he has done or not done. I'll try to be fair to Trump, but not nice to him. So here we go.

The Wall

One of Mr. Trump's infamous plans is to have a wall built on the border between Mexico and the United States and have Mexico pay for it. And recently, he did an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he is going to have Mexico pay for it, but indirectly. He states:

"They can pay for it indirectly through NAFTA. We make a good deal on NAFTA, and, say, I'm going to take a small percentage of that money and it's going toward the wall. Guess what? Mexico's paying."

However, according to a CNBC article, "it is unclear what mechanism would go into NAFTA that would cause Mexico to indirectly pay for the structure."

So, it seems like Trump is trying to follow through, but he's not being very clear on whether Mexico will even pay for the wall. Former Mexican president, Vicente Fox, has said, and I quote, "I am not gonna pay for that f--king wall."

But this wall has been estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars to build and hundreds of millions to maintain every single year, according to an article from The New York Times. This wall would also have to stretch across nearly 2,000 miles of rough terrain and mountains.

All of this money is being used on an expensive wall that wouldn't actually work. Some may not know this, but there is already fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, already used to prevent illegal immigrants to enter from either side.

And the fencing doesn't even really work. Some people think that illegal immigrants simply enter the country by walking across the border. But the fact is, a lot of the undocumented immigrants in this country enter with legal working visas that they simply overstay, after their visa expires.

An article from the Center of Migration Studies has found statistics such as these:

• In 2014, about 4.5 million US residents, or 42 percent of the total undocumented population, were overstays.
• Overstays accounted for about two-thirds (66 percent) of those who arrived (i.e., joined the undocumented population) in 2014.

To add on, according to the Pew Research Center, 48% of illegal immigrants in the United States aren't from Mexico. And according to a statistic that Mr. Trump TWEETED HIMSELF, illegal immigration is at an all-time low in decades.

So, if illegal immigration is so low at this point, and there's already a fence on the border that you can see through, and so many illegal immigrants come in through planes, we don't need to spend billions on a wall, like Trump says we do.

It doesn't even appear that Trump knows what he's talking about. Trump spoke about having a wall that we can see through so we can see who's on the other side, but the border fence is already on the border, and we can see through it.

So, there's already a fence on the border that we can see through. So, Trump paying for a border wall would be meaningless, because it's already there. And according to an Aol article, Trump said about the see-through wall:

"Does this make sense or am I just wasting my time?"

YES. You ARE wasting your time. I said that I'd be unbiased, but these are just facts. A wall wouldn't work. It's time to accept it.

The Economy

As a multi-billionaire businessman, a lot of voters expected Trump to do great things with the economy. And according to a recent article from CNN, the stock market has been surging. The article states:

It took the market almost 100 years to reach 5,000. It's grown more than 5,000 points in Trump's first year in office.

Mr. Trump has also seized his opportunity to brag about the stock market.

And according to another CNN article, Trump's job record for his first year wasn't as strong as Obama's, but is still relatively strong. He added two million jobs, and those are some good numbers.

Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

Last June, President Trump announced that the United States would be backing out of the Paris Agreement, which is an agreement to stop climate change, which is an objectively bad decision.

NASA has released damning evidence of climate change, and according to another NASA article, there will be major heat waves and sea level rise within the next hundred years. But does Trump believe in it? Hell no.

That's a sitting U.S. president and the so-called leader of the free world not believing in climate change, which a majority of scientists know is a major issue.

And even if you think you're smarter than all the Ivy League graduate scientists, how is it smart to take the risk by pulling out of the Paris Agreement?!

Presidential Character

What does a president need? I believe a president needs maturity, intelligence, levelheadedness, honesty to an extent, thick skin, and the ability to make good decisions and not be hypocritical.

But Trump doesn't check any boxes here. Recently, he sparked controversy when he said that he wanted immigrants from countries like Norway instead of countries like Haiti and "s**thole countries." At this point, I can't believe a president said this, but it's very likely that he did say this.

These remarks are openly racist, and White House spokesperson Raj Shah did not even deny that Trump made the remark. However, Trump did deny it:

Which brings us to something else: honesty. According to an interactive live fact-checker from the Washington Post, Trump has told 2,140 lies or misleading claims in the past year.

And these include false claims that he has repeated north of 90 times. I don't know how a person can be proven wrong and yet somehow find ways to repeat himself that many times. Look at the fact-checker. It's all there.

So, the President of the United States is not a credible person. Someone who averages 5.9 lies a day is someone we cannot trust, and HE'S the one who criticizes the news for being "fake"?

I don't know how anyone can possibly lie that much. That is the definition of pathological lying. Now, there are naturally two places that we can get political news from: the media or the White House. And Trump has been discrediting the media almost every day for years.

The thing is, Trump actually did this. He released an article on the GOP site listing the fakest news reported in the year. When you thought he couldn't get any more unpresidential, he did this.

The list is here, and a lot of the stories were later retracted and said by the news source to have been false.

And I kid you not, they could find so few false stories that tried to actively slander Trump's role as president, that they pulled out a falsely reported story about how Trump overfed fish.

Overfeeding fish? Like yes, that was an edited video reported by CNN, but that's a very minor thing when you're listing the top 10 fake news stories. Like, THIS is what's in the top 10? Shame on CNN for reporting the lie, but come on.

Trump also tweeted a threat against North Korea on Twitter:

Now, it's a good thing that Trump doesn't actually have a literal nuclear button on his White House desk, and sending missiles to North Korea is actually a much more complex action, but provoking someone like Kim Jong-Un is a BAD IDEA.

I don't know which one of us could strike the other first, but I hope NONE of us get struck by missiles, you know what I'm sayin'? I watched Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and being incinerated by missiles does not look like a fun way to die.

Remember: in a nuclear attack, this is ACTUALLY how it looks, so I don't want any provocations.

Trump has also criticized Obama for how often he went golfing during his presidency.

But according to Trump Golf Count, he has spent nearly $50 million tax dollars on his golfing trips at a much higher rate than Obama was golfing. So, this is blatant hypocrisy.

Now, I don't like Trump as a person, and with the current government shutdown, I think he is still unqualified for his job as president. He has done well with the economy, but overall, I don't believe this presidency will be remembered as a good one.

And that was a brief analysis of President Trump's first year in office.

I used a couple of sources for this article, so here they are.

• Donald Trump Signals Openness to North Korea Diplomacy in Interview – The Wall Street Journal
• Trump claims Mexico will 'indirectly' pay for a wall through NAFTA – CNBC
• Border Wall Could Cost 3 Times Estimates, Senate Democrats’ Report Says – The New York Times
• The 2,000 Mile Wall in Search of a Purpose – Center of Migration Studies
• Chapter 2: Birthplaces of U.S. Unauthorized Immigrants – Pew Research Center
• Trump doubles down on the need for a 'see-through' border wall – Aol
• How good the stock market under Drumpf really is, in one chart – CNN
• Trump's first-year jobs record was strong. Just not as strong as Obama's last year – CNN Money
• Climate change: How do we know? – NASA
• The consequences of climate change – NASA
• In 365 days, President Trump has made 2,140 false or misleading claims – The Washington Post
• The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards – GOP
• Trump Golf Count