For the first time in a long time, this was Donald Trump's week.

It was in May last year that US President Donald Trump told dazzled supporters at a campaign rally that, under his leadership, they were going to win so much that they were going to get tired of winning.

"You'll say 'please, please Mr President, it's too much winning. We can't take it any more'."

Almost a year into his presidency, though, Republican donors and parts of Trump's loyal base were beginning to notice that there has not been quite that much winning.

While President Trump is feeling the heat of the Russia probe, he has managed to achieve his first big legislative victory.

The economy is humming along nicely, in exactly the same trajectory it was before the election, but Trump's Republican Party had failed to pass a single significant piece of legislation.

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It had failed even to hold together the votes to repeal Obamacare, having voted to do so 70 times while former US president Barack Obama was in office.

On Tuesday, Rex Tillerson, the US Secretary of State in whom Trump has so publicly lost faith, lamented to American diplomats in Brussels that "we don't have any wins on the board yet".

At times this year, the Trump administration has resembled an enormous machine with a key component missing, creating noise and heat and smoke all to little practical end.

But this week, Republicans have enjoyed a huge political win.

Trump made a major change in American foreign policy and announced a raft of measures and positions that seem designed to further cement his standing among his die-hard supporters.

Aware of the Republican Party's slim US Senate majority, Trump has endorsed the controversial hardliner Roy Moore, who is running for one of Alabama's two Senate seats.

Moore has twice been removed as the conservative southern state's chief justice for ignoring federal court directives - one to remove a tablet of the 10 Commandments from his courthouse and one to allow gay people in his state to marry in keeping with a ruling by the US Supreme Court.

On Monday, Trump moved to shrink to prominent national parks, calling for a reduction of Bears Ears National Monument by 84 per cent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by 50 per cent.

Bears Ears was created by the Obama administration and its reduction is seen as a move to eventually allow for commercial oil drilling.

The administration enjoyed another win when the Supreme Court allowed the third version of Trump's travel ban against six Muslim-majority nations to go into effect despite ongoing appeals.

Perhaps the most significant developments were the passage of tax reform bills through both the Senate and the House of Representatives and the President's announcement that he would recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital and begin the process of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv.

In tax reform, it now appears Republicans are likely to pass their first significant legislation, a measure that has long been demanded by supporters and donors.

The details have not yet been settled upon. The House and the Senate passed different bills, which must now be unified in conference before being signed into law by the president.

On Tuesday, Trump said Congress were working on the bill "so that it comes out very beautifully", The New York Times reported.

"I call it 'the mixer'," he said. "It's a conference where everyone gets together and they pick all the good things and get rid of the things they don't like."

What the bills have in common is sweeping corporate and personal tax cuts across the board that non-partisan analysts calculate will cost anywhere from $US1 trillion ($1.33 trillion) to $US1.5 trillion over the next decade.

So enthusiastic are congressional Republicans about passing the measure and securing a rare political win that the so-called "deficit hawks" who blocked all spending measures under the Obama administration have come on board.

The passing of the bills has been welcomed by the Republican Party's most powerful - and generous - supporters.

"The decades-long drive toward meaningful tax reform is closer than ever to becoming a reality," said US Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue during the week.

"We applaud the senators who today advanced a legislative package that will grow the economy, create jobs, and allow middle-class Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money.

"This bill will encourage investment here in the United States as businesses hire workers, expand facilities and buy new equipment."

Similarly, the bill's authors say that the tax cuts will provide such a boost to the economy that the costs will be negated. So far no independent analysts have agreed.

"The biggest loser in all this was their commitment to fiscal discipline, which went away as fast as you can blink," said Maya MacGuineas​, president of the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Bloomberg reported.

The administration's critics have been even more fierce.

The fact that the overhaul bills were written without any hearings into their impact, so fast that those who voted on them had no chance to read them, and with additions handwritten into the margins, has prompted furious condemnation.

"The Republican Party is now rationalising and enabling Mr Trump's autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behaviour in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it," wrote political scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times that the bill was a "giant scam" in which short-term tax cuts for the poor evaporated over years while massive cuts for the wealthy were locked in.

"The core of the bill is a huge redistribution of income from lower and middle-income families to corporations and business owners," he wrote.

Responses to Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital have been similarly mixed.

Both Israelis and Palestinians claim the city as their own and it has long been the international position that its final status should be settled by negotiation between the two parties.

This has been reflected in US foreign policy over the past 70 years, but the careful approach ended abruptly with Trump's announcement on Wednesday.

It remains to be seen if that will backfire, or if the US president's biggest week of wins wasn't really that at all.