Trump’s appointments outshine even the Gipper’s

Jonah Goldberg, doyen of the National Review's NeverTrumps, offered the following assessment of Donald Trump's first hundred days:

I've been mildly surprised by a few things about Trump's performance so far – and most of them were pleasant surprises. Most of his appointments have been good and a few have been great. I think there's a lot of hype to his executive orders, but there aren't many I don't support. In short, he's doing better than I thought he would. But this is a remarkably low bar. It's not quite like saying that Greta is the "sexiest East German weightlifter alive" or "this is the most exciting show on C-SPAN" but it's not that far off.

It's hard to imagine a more backhanded and condescending "compliment" than that, but it represents miles of progress since N.R. began lobbing missiles at Trump over a year ago, accusing him of being a phony conservative and even a closeted "liberal Democrat."

Yet the appointments made by Trump compare favorably to those made by the greatest and most conservative president of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan.

Here are some of the major ones, presented in an easy-to-compare chart:

On the whole, Trump's list looks more conservative than Reagan's, in some cases laughably so (Neil Gorsuch vs. Sandra Day O'Connor at the Supreme Court, for instance).

Now, it might be stated that, in fairness to Reagan, he was confident enough in his own ideology to select some of the administrative and Cabinet-level nominees on their ability to execute policies rather than on their fidelity to conservative principles.

And obviously, none of this is remotely to suggest that Trump is "better" than Reagan, which in any event would be a ludicrous assertion to make on the basis of three months in office.

But what Trump has done is to assemble something close to a conservative dream team, quite possibly the most conservative set of appointees in a century.

This should earn him full-throated accolades from conservatives and not just mild, grudging approval.

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