Six months into Donald Trump’s incompetent presidency, most of his major promises are stalled and unlikely ever to be achieved. The “big, beautiful” Mexican border wall is so far off that Trump has taken to talking about in fantasy terms, promising it would have solar panels and be “transparent” so Americans can make sure that drug dealers would not be able to throw “large sacks of drugs over.” Repealing and replacing Obamacare is not entirely dead, but has returned to its zombie state, which means Trump will have trouble passing large tax cuts (since a big chunk of the revenue was supposed to come from reducing health care spending). Tax reform, supposedly the next big effort, is as fraught as health care reform. A big infrastructure bill also looks unlikely, given Republican aversion to deficit spending.

And that’s just domestically. On the international front, there’s still talk of, but little movement on, renegotiating NAFTA. Trump’s signature idea—to cultivate a friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin—is meeting resistance from Trump’s own administration, not to mention Congress. More broadly, American foreign policy is now an incoherent combination of isolationist gestures from the president, like not promising to defend NATO allies, while his foreign policy team reassures them that America’s global commitments remain unchanged. Trump is sending dangerously mixed signals to the world, but his behavior here isn’t necessarily transformative because it doesn’t appear to be precipitating any permanent institutional changes that the next president couldn’t undo. (Notably, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement doesn’t take effect until a day after the 2020 presidential election.)

Some liberals perhaps are heaving a sigh of relief that Trump is such an inept head of state, his policy agenda in tatters. But if many of his more grandiose dreams are broken, he’s become ever more committed to a narrower and more focused, but equally pernicious agenda. Call it Rump Trumpism. By relentlessly focusing on ethnonationalism and court appointments, he maintains the rabid loyalty of his hard-nationalist base, a faction large enough to discourage Republican-elected officials from challenging Trump’s many norm-violations. Although less ambitious than the “America First” agenda, Rump Trumpism will do serious, permanent damage in its own right.

With Trump’s protectionism and isolationism dulled, what remains of his “America First” agenda? Immigration. Trump’s Muslim travel ban goes before the Supreme Court in October, but is still, in modified form, being carried out today. For immigrants inside America, the situation is equally dire. As Vox’s Dara Lind argued in May, Trump’s failures in the legislative realm have to be set against his successes in remaking immigration policy by executive fiat, without congressional approval.

“The administration has already left a huge mark on the lives of nonwhites in America—particularly immigrants, and particularly unauthorized immigrants,” she wrote. “It’s quietly, without pronouncements or hiring surges, ratcheted up the risk that immigrants will be apprehended and deported.... By creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities, the Trump administration has embraced the extreme discretion it has in enforcing these laws. It still has the potential to wreak lasting damage on nonwhite American communities—to unsew them from public life.”

