Donald Trump maintains an illusion of forward motion by taking America backwards at every opportunity

Donald Trump measures his progress as President by the number of things he can destroy and undo. He is the angry kid on the beach kicking over the sand castles others have left behind. The more intricate they are, the more pleasure he derives from levelling them.

He has at times seemed desperate to demonstrate that his presidency is off to a racing start. “I’d like to begin with an update on our tremendous – absolutely tremendous – economic progress since Election Day on November 8th,” he said at the very top of his Rose Garden speech announcing his biggest put-the-boot-in target to date – the Paris climate accord.

Taking credit for headway made since Election Day is a dodgy proposition to begin with since Barack Obama was in charge for more than two months thereafter. The jobs numbers for May – a month that might actually tell us something about the Trump effect – were in fact not terrific. Rather than the 185,000 new jobs experts were looking for, the country added only 135,000.

But Donald, yes, if your intention is to show you have been bubbling with energy since taking office then we yield. You have been a walking, talking, (tweeting) wrecking ball. Anything with Obama’s name on it – boom. And hark, as you cup your ears inside the Oval Office, your supporters cheer. There are exceptions, of course. Your wife chose to preserve the vegetable garden planted by Michelle, her predecessor as first lady. That’s ecologically sound at least.

Naturally, you went for lowest-hanging fruit first, using your powers as president to the full. You had barely unpacked before consigning that giant trade deal that was meant to be one of the principal planks of Obama’s economic legacy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to oblivion. (You will see that the 11 other signatory nations have begun efforts to revive it with or without you.)

You bulldozed Republicans on the Hill to make full, and rare, use of the Congressional Review Act, to nullify rules adopted in the last weeks of the Obama era. In the 60-day window allowed, they erased 14 separate regulations. No longer must the Social Services department share data on mentally ill individuals to keep them from buying guns. Gone is a ban on states withholding funds from Planned Parenthood clinics that offer abortion services. Restrictions on the dumping of debris from mountaintop mining into streams are extinguished. To name a few.

You reversed Obama’s block on the Keystone Pipeline to bring heavy crude through the Great Plains from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and your proposed budget implies an end to a 1980 ban on drilling for oil in the Arctic National Refuge, though that would require an act of Congress and it might be tricky. You have ordered a review of Obama’s Clean Power Plan that set a framework for states to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. That alone would make staying in the Paris Accord almost moot, since it was the main means for America to meet its commitments.

This is an unravelling presidency. (Unravelling of your predecessor’s legacy, that is, not of you.) Among your executive orders: a review of steps Obama took to designate 554 million acres as national monuments protecting them from natural resources exploitation. With another you vowed to “do a number“ on the post-crisis banking reforms passed after the 2008 crash.

That budget blueprint – delivered, we noticed, while you were far away in Europe – is a veritable hay mower. Were it to pass in anything like its current form, American aid to developing nations would drop by a third. It would eviscerate parts of the social safety net for the poor, many of whom voted for you, like slashing $192bn from the food stamp programme in ten years.

America’s relationships with its allies are not exempt from the pattern. In his determination to keep his base applauding, Trump is recklessly jeopardising alliances that have been the bedrock of economic and diplomatic stability for decades. Have any of us seen European leaders speak of the United States in such despairing terms as they have in the days since he returned from Brussels and Sicily and made his Paris accord pledge? President Emmanuel Macron knew exactly what the impact would be of his make-our-planet-great-again jibe. Angela Merkel’s declaration that Europe could no longer rely on the US was remarkable in its bluntness

It’s not only that Trump likes breaking things or aggression in politics – note his celebrating the “great win for Montana” when voters chose a Republican for Congress hours after he assaulted a reporter for The Guardian. This is also about obscuring his failure actually to build or create anything, which is ironic given the industry he comes from and his deal maker boasts.

While he has signed a smattering of bills of negligible significance – one suggesting the citizenry be encouraged to run up the American flag on Veteran’s Day – his hopes of putting pen to at least one, society changing law in his first months in office have been dashed. His zeal for euthanising Obamacare necessarily had to be paired with some kind of coherent replacement legislation. Yes, the House eventually passed something on its second go-around. But who knows how long the Senate will take forging its own version? Somewhere on the horizon may be potentially major items like tax and immigration reform. It is a horizon, however, that is looking more and more distant.

But a president is still able to bring about significant change simply by undoing, defying and destroying. In the sand-castle-smashing department, Trump has proved remarkably adept.