One Year Later, a Look at Trump’s Pledges About the Presidency

WASHINGTON — As a freewheeling candidate on the campaign trail, Donald Trump amassed a long list of promises.

Some became rallying cries and signature to his candidacy (“build the wall”). Others reflected conventional Republican policy wishes (repealing the Affordable Care Act). And then there were the unorthodox pledges about how he would comport himself in office, a few probably improvised (“I will never be in a bicycle race”) or doomed from the start (“We won’t tweet anymore — not presidential”).

Trump has described his first year in office as “a year of real change.” Here is an assessment on his progress on promises about his approach to the presidency.

Of the six measures Trump outlined in his 100-day action plan “to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington,” he has kept his word on two, imposing lifetime bans on White House officials lobbying for foreign governments and requiring the elimination of two regulations for every one enacted.

He has also partially fulfilled two pledges.His promised hiring freeze on federal employees was enacted in January 2017, but lifted in April.

Additionally, he took a narrowly tailored approach to his pledge to bar White House and congressional officials from lobbying for five years after leaving office. Rather than a blanket restriction, his executive order specified that White House officials could not lobby the agencies they served, and did not cover congressional officials.

But he has not taken any action on two other promises. Trump has yet to propose term limits for members of Congress or enact a ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for U.S. elections.

Trump, a billionaire, vowed to not take “even one dollar” of his $400,000 annual salary as president, following in the footsteps of presidents like John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover.

So far, he has kept his word, donating his paychecks to the National Park Service in the first quarter of 2017, the Education Department in the second, and then the Health and Human Services Department in the third to help combat the opioid crisis. The White House would not answer questions about what Trump would do with his paychecks in the fourth quarter of last year.

As the first presidential candidate in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, Trump repeatedly vowed to do so once his Internal Revenue Service audit was complete.

The pledge was flawed to begin with. Though tax lawyers may advise against it, the IRS has said that an audit does not prevent individuals from releasing their own tax information. The Trump campaign also released a letter from his lawyers that said Trump’s tax returns, before 2009, were “closed administratively” — or no longer subject to an audit.

But in May, Trump reneged on the promise in an interview with The Economist, moving the release date to “after I’m out of office.”

After incessantly chastising President Barack Obama for golfing, Trump promised during the campaign that “because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf.” He later made an exception for “leaders of countries and people who can help us.”

Yet Trump has played more golf than his predecessor, according to independent trackers.

The White House has repeatedly declined to comment on Trump’s golf partners. While he played a round with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in February, he was also accompanied by professional golf players, not world leaders, for at least four games.

Trump pledged to “not be a president who took vacations” and blasted Obama for his own personal trips.

In a 2012 report, the Congressional Research Service concluded that the president is “always on duty” and that his vacations are considered official travel.

Over the past year, Trump has taken some R&R. He spent 17 days in at his golf club in New Jersey, which the White House labeled a “working vacation,” and voyaged to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a holiday respite that included presidential duties.

It is unclear how those trips were different from the vacations that Trump criticized Obama for taking. The former president, for example, spent holidays in Hawaii — a frequent talking point of Trump’s — where he played golf, received intelligence briefings and visited troops.

Overall, Trump has visited a Trump property one out of every three days since taking office.