On Friday, a top State Department official who has served in the Obama and Trump administrations announced that gains against the Islamic State have picked up sharply and that the militants have lost 78 percent of their territory in Iraq and 58 percent in Syria. The Washington Post’s headline (which the White House circulated in an email): “Under Trump, gains against ISIS have dramatically accelerated.”
These two developments, in addition to being successes, had another thing in common: In both cases, the Trump administration essentially embraced Obama administration policies -- policies Trump previously derided as a “total failure.