US presidents are irrelevant. Actual changes that affect peoples everyday life are marginal. The only big change is the rhetoric and the so called “national dialogue”. The national dialogue is the conversations you have among family, friends and the hot debates you have on Facebook with trolls.
I will make two points that prove the above statement.
First, imagine if I had the ability to block out who won election night. I somehow had the power to redact everything you read with regard to who won the presidency. If I was to ask you, based on your everyday life two years into the presidency, “who won”, you would not know.
Second, I am going to discuss the current national dialogue. This is the hot topic known as immigration, both legal and illegal. All of the information below is from the “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2017”. I am aware that people debate the absolute numbers. What is more important is the trends are consistent between all these different studies.
Illegal immigration peaked in 2006-2008 time frame. It has been on a steady decline since that time period.
Those talking about the “flood of illegal immigrants” are about a decade late to the conversation. The trends are changing. They show people are going home.
It wasn’t more than a few years ago we heard Obama was “flooding the US with refugee’s”. No one every defined what they meant by flood.
The above chart shows no flood.
What about deportations and aliens removed?
It shows a steady increase from the mid 90’s. This trend cuts right through the Clinton, Bush and Obama years. Obama was depicted as a softy on illegal aliens.
The US government is not some top down command center. These government departments take on a life of their own. Think about the drastic difference in rhetoric between Trump and Obama. Now reflect on the above charts. If Hilary would have won or Obama would have lost in previous elections, do you think these numbers would be different? Behind the scenes, these bureaucracies chug along, regardless of the presidents rhetoric and stated goals. The only way to inflict damage on these bureaucracies is to cut their funding. This is not happening. It rarely ever happens. Each year congress sends a massive spending bill to the president. It is usually over 2,000 pages. Politically, the president has little choice in signing it. The president has little power in cutting funding to any of these bureaucracies.
If Hilary would have won, we would all be discussing LGBT bathroom rights or climate change. The national dialogue would be drastically different. Newspaper headlines would be drastically different. But for the bureaucracies, it would be business as usual.