Since the Trump Presidency began back in January, we have endeavored to maintain a comprehensive listing of all the administrations misdeeds in the Everything Awful The Trump Administration Has Done Omnibus (full list here), and have attempted to categorize and score them accordingly. Today is October 20th, which means that as of noon today we are 9 months in to the Trump administration. To mark the occasion, we are releasing the Everything Terrible Trump Has Done 3rd Qtr. Brief.

We already provided a thorough explanation of our methodology in the Everything Terrible Trump Has Done 2nd Quarter Report, so we’ll just skip straight to the results. For anyone interested, an in-depth discussion as to how we classified and scored actions can be found here.

Overall Results

The overall impact score of Trump’s bad policies were largely unchanged from the last quarter. After several months of consistent decline in the first few months of the administration, the pace of activity rebounded sharply in month 7, hit an all time low in month 8, then rebounded again. While the pace and impact of the Trump administration’s actions can vary significantly between months, generally it seems the pace has stabilized around pretty steady average over time.

In the last three months, Trump did not achieve much legislatively, however he is still finding plenty of ways to enact policy through his executive orders, rule-making, and the discretionary powers of the Presidency. In fact, to a large extent the third quarter saw the Trump Administration making many of the temporary halt’s on Obama era policy permanent.

Top 5 Awful Policies of the Third Quarter

Based on the scores of the Trump Omnibus, we’ve determined that the top 5 harmful actions of the Trump administration were as follows:

Tied between “Signed an executive order which threatens to degrade health insurance coverage for millions and raise premiums for older, sicker Americans” and “Ended health insurance subsidies for low income people that help pay out of pockets costs for millions. This not only threatens the physical and economic well being of the people who receive those subsidies, but also threatens to unravel health insurance markets” Unveiled a budget that basically no one wants which cuts taxes for corporations and the rich and horribly undermines government funding With Mike Pence providing the deciding vote, Republicans continued to advance their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act in favor of their own healthcare bill, which would deprive healthcare from millions, on to the Senate floor despite the fact that the bill is deeply unpopular and most don’t even know what was in the bill. Neglected the devastation in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricane Maria Rushed to pack courts with anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ judges

These ratings are, of course, subjective and open to debate. For example, the scoring system for the Trump Omnibus tends to privilege items that have a high level of legal formality and items with a long term impact/which are easy to reverse. That’s why Trump’s effort’s to pack courts with anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ judges, which is a relatively low key item, is ranked quite high (i’d stand by that ranking). Conversely, Trump threatening to pardon everyone involved in the Russian scandal, which is a serious enough threat that even suggesting it has severe ramifications for political norms, still scored relatively lower. You can argue about how appropriate this all is. As they say, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words may catastrophically undermine health insurance marketplaces”.

Policy Area

Generally, the adverse impact of the Trump’s policies was largely unchanged. That is to say, he did about as much damage between July 20-October 19 as he did between April 20-July 19. As before, the greatest impact was felt in policies effecting economic and physical well-being, such as healthcare, labor protections, environmental regulations, and similar issues. Actions effecting civil liberties and human rights were the next highest category, followed by issues corroding government and political institutions. This was largely unchanged from the first two quarters of the Trump Administration. Similarly, the impact was spread broadly across particular issues, which suggests the Administration is still operated in a fairly scattershot manner, hitting as many issues as it can with really coordinating.

There are some notable developments from previous quarters when you get down to the level of specific policies. For one thing, the Administration’s impact on healthcare greatly increased First, in the last 3 months the Administration, and really congressional Republicans, made multiple efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, reviving repeal efforts multiple times and very nearly succeeding. When these efforts eventually failed entirely, the Trump unilaterally began implementing orders undermining the ACA and drastically restricting the quality and affordability of health insurance. This concerted effort, eventually shifting into significant policy directives. The effects of these efforts are already being felt, with the uninsured rate spiking sharply since July.

Beyond healthcare, the last quarter also saw a significant uptick in activity in the realm of immigration and civil rights issues. On immigration, Trump finally set the wheels in motion to end DACA and set the condition that any revival in DACA would require implementing draconian anti-immigration measures, among other things. Meanwhile, in the realm of civil rights his administration put substantial weight behind efforts to protect discriminatory voter ID laws, banned transgender soldiers from the military, dismantled civil rights protections in the workplace, and generally continued to pack the courts with anti-choice anti-LGBT judges, just to name a few things. Collectively, these actions added up. And, of course, the issue of right wing extremism forced its way onto the scene rather dramatically (what with the Nazis parading in the streets and all).

On the other hand, the last three months saw a relative lull in the unfolding Russian scandal, generally lacking the explosive revelations of the Spring and early Summer. The investigation is still proceeding in the background, though it will still likely be some time before the findings are released. This was somewhat offset by revelations of other abuses of power, notably the revelation that the administration decided to ignore decades of established DoJ policy on nepotism and wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax payer money in travel expenses.