It has been a year since the reality TV star turned politician was elected President of the United States.
Happy Trumpiversary!
That's right, it has already been a whole year since Donald Trump won the US election. Time really flies when you're living in constant fear of a nuclear apocalypse.
But I suspect it has dragged on a bit for Trump himself, who has been under siege from the media, his political opponents, an investigation into his campaign and, worst of all, leakers inside his own administration.
Trump has enjoyed some victories. Soon after taking office, he followed through on his pledge to appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court, vindicating the faith of many Republican voters who reluctantly supported his candidacy for that reason alone.
U.S. President Donald Trump puts on a military jacket as he meets the US troops at the U.S. Yokota Air Base, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Photo / AP
He also withdrew America from the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade deal hated by the more populist wing of his party. And as promised, America's economic growth has been strong.
Beyond that, however, the first 10 months of Trump's presidency have delivered one frustrating defeat after another, as he has struggled to fulfil his promises.
Multiple attempts to scrap Barack Obama's polarising healthcare law, Obamacare, failed in Congress, even with Republicans controlling a majority in both the Senate and the House.
Tax reform has stalled and is unlikely to pass anytime soon.
The courts have repeatedly blocked Trump's travel ban, foiling his efforts to crack down on immigration from Muslim nations.
He has ditched his pledge to confront China for manipulating its currency, instead cosying up to the Asian superpower.
And remember that border wall Mexico was going to pay for? It hasn't even been started, let alone funded.
All of this falls against the backdrop of Trump's worrying unpopularity. He is the only modern president, in 70 years of polling, to have a negative approval rating a year after the election - the second worst rating on record is Bill Clinton's positive 11 per cent.
Unless you are the type of person who judges a president's success by the number of Twitter feuds he starts, Trump's tenure has been mixed at best so far.
But that's OK. He has three more years to deliver on his promises before facing voters again.
And the truth is, whether you like it or not, Trump has already accomplished something far more consequential than fiddling with tax rates or building a glorified fence.
He has completely transformed one side of American politics.
Last year's election wasn't just about who would sit in the Oval Office for four years. The fight between Republicans and Democrats was less important than the one between Republicans and other Republicans.
It was the culmination of a civil war for the soul of the conservative movement in the United States.
Think of previous Republican presidents, and even presidential nominees - Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney, to name the most recent. As men, they were nothing like the braggadocious Trump.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce the nomination of Kirstjen Nielsen to be secretary of Homeland Security, in the East Room of the White House. Photo / AP
More importantly, conservatives supported them for very different reasons.
Those candidates all fit snugly into what has come to be known, particularly among Trump's fans, as the "establishment" wing of the party. Yes, even Reagan. He was an insurgent candidate to begin with, but during his presidency, his political philosophy became the default Republican position.
Small government. Low taxes. Free trade. Social conservatism. Peace through strength. American leadership in the world. The Republican presidential nominees who followed Reagan tinkered around the edges, but never really deviated from that tradition, presenting the same basic ideas to voters at every election.
Until Trump. The President himself is as close as you can get to a non-ideological politician - he mainly just cares about making himself look good - but the movement he so savvily tapped into has a clear philosophy of its own.
Low immigration. Anti-trade. Isolationist. Nationalist. America first. There are still elements of the party's old platform on issues like taxes, guns and abortion, but populist Trumpism is radically different from the past 35 years of American conservatism.
Trump faced a bunch of Reaganites in the Republican primaries last year, in a duel of these two incompatible conservative visions. For a long time, pundits assumed voters would eventually unify behind Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich - anyone, really, to stop Trump from becoming the nominee.
It never happened. And once it was a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, most of the Republican voters with doubts about Trump fell in line behind him.
Which brings me back to the true significance of that election day. If Trump had suffered the heavy defeat so many people expected, it would have been a brutal repudiation of his politics - and with the Trump experiment a failure, Republicans probably would have written off 2016 as an anomaly and returned to something resembling "establishment" conservatism.
Instead, Trump was vindicated. By winning the election, he also triumphed in the Republican civil war.
The President has always been right about one thing - politicians are craven. Now the so-called establishment that fought so hard to stop Trump serves as his shield, refusing to condemn even his worst acts.
There are still some holdouts refusing to accept defeat. Two senators, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, both spoke out stridently against Trump recently. But what do those guys have in common? They are retiring, and will never face the voters again.
Lucky them, because there are two huge groups of voters salivating at the prospect of turfing out mainstream Republicans: Trump supporters who see them as disloyal to the President, and everyone else, who thinks they are too loyal to him.
If you criticise Trump, you're screwed from the right. If you don't criticise him, you're screwed from the left. Either way, you lose.
The inevitable result is the kind of electoral bloodbath we saw in the swing state Virginia yesterday, where Republicans suffered defeats on a historic scale.
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!
Many Republican politicians genuinely despise the president, but you won't hear them admit it in public. They are terrified of Trump's base - as they should be.
Those voters have rejected the old conservatism. When Trump is gone, they won't simply flock back to it. The politicians can either come to terms with that fact and adapt, or ignore it and face extinction.
It is the party of Trump now, and there is no going back.
