In 2016, Donald Trump made just one campaign visit to Oregon — and it included some big promises to restore timber jobs.

“You need help from the federal government,” Trump told a raucous crowd in Eugene in advance of the state’s May primary. “Timber jobs have been cut in half since 1990. We’re going to bring ‘em up folks, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to bring ‘em up, OK?”

In the years since, the Trump administration has indeed been friendlier to the timber industry as it seeks to increase timber harvests in the national forests. But as past Republican administrations have learned, returning the industry to an upward trajectory is exceptionally difficult.

Logging and forestry jobs are down since Trump took office. And wood products manufacturing stayed about flat until the coronavirus pandemic, when it dipped.

This is a story that has repeated itself across Oregon during most of Trump’s years in office. The state’s economy largely stayed on the same trajectory as during the Obama administration. Oregon’s overall manufacturing employment stayed level, but Trump’s protectionist trade policies didn’t lead to big job gains. Ditto for agriculture, which won some favorable regulatory policies, but lost markets in China because of the trade wars.

“I can’t think of anything that has changed dramatically for any of those industries,” said Joe Cortright, a Portland economist who chairs the governor’s council of economic advisors. “There hasn’t been any shift towards growth in any of those sectors that wasn’t already apparent.”

In the same fashion, Trump has not been able to reverse many of the most important policies that Oregon’s Democratic-dominated government cherishes. So far, the administration has been unable to abolish the Affordable Care Act — otherwise known as Obamacare — that state leaders have aggressively used to provide health care for low-income Oregonians. The federal food-stamp program remains intact despite attempted rollbacks by the Trump administration.

Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum recently told Oregon Public Broadcasting she’s now participated in more than 25 lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies on everything from the environment to immigration. Meanwhile, the Oregon Legislature and Gov. Kate Brown strengthened protections for abortion rights as Trump has worked to confirm a Supreme Court justice nominee that could repeal Roe vs. Wade.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that Trump’s presidential term hasn’t been hugely consequential for people in the Pacific Northwest.

Like the rest of the country, Oregonians have experienced the twists and turns of a presidency different than any other in living memory. For example, the Trump administration has gone much further than any recent administrations — Republican or Democratic — in trying to close the borders to immigrants, reduce legal immigration and ratchet up deportations. That deeply affects Oregon, home to the nation’s 14th largest per capita Latino population.

Since the racial justice protests started in Portland in May, Trump has repeatedly attacked the city’s handling of them — more than 70 times in tweets or retweets and at his prime-time speech for the Republican National Convention. His administration last month declared Portland an “anarchist jurisdiction” and has threatened to yank some federal funds.

Most of all, virtually no one has been untouched by the pandemic and by Trump’s handling of it.

Whether you blame the president for not moving more decisively to limit the spread of the virus or the governor for restricting business activity, the unprecedented sharp economic slowdown has at least temporarily wiped out all of the job gains — and more — of Trump’s presidency. In Oregon, employment levels are now back to where they were at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s last year in office.

As a result, Cortright and other economists say, you can’t talk about Trump’s economic record in Oregon without considering his handling of the pandemic.

Still, examining some of Trump’s policies in Oregon is also a reminder of how the president’s outsized rhetoric and claims of dealmaking mastery often don’t get him what he wanted — at least not initially.

Timber and the environment

Timber and agriculture no longer dominate Oregon’s economy. But the state’s vast forests and farmlands are still important, and they’re part of a huge and dramatic landscape that defines so much of life in Oregon.

Urban Oregon may think that Trump cares little about helping its residents. He lost the state in the 2016 election, and he’s never visited since. When he mentions Oregon, it’s mostly to bash Portland. But from the day Trump took office, the rural areas and natural-resource industries that so heavily supported him have been rewarded with attention and support.

“On our issues involving western water and farming and ranching, we’ve got the best attention from this administration that I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Keppen, executive director of the Klamath Falls-based Family Farm Alliance.

He said the administration sent a mediator to the Klamath Basin to try to work out conflicts among different water users, including tribes, farmers and environmentalists. And this July, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt visited to meet with farmers.

Trump two years ago signed an executive order to promote the “reliable supply and delivery of water in the West,” and it included a call to speed work in the Klamath Basin and on the Columbia River. In the latter case, varied interests have been fighting for years over salmon restoration and whether to remove four Snake River dams blamed for much of the loss of fish habitat.

However, no agreement has been reached so far in the Klamath Basin. And a legal roadblock surrounding liability issues could delay PacifiCorp’s plans to remove four dams on the Klamath River, which would play a big role in improving salmon habitat while helping the commercial fisheries up and down the West Coast.

Under the Trump administration, the Bonneville Power Administration and several federal agencies finalized a new environmental plan for overseeing the operation of the Columbia River. It rules out consideration of breaching the Snake River dams, but at this point, the warring parties seem to agree that more litigation is at stake.

Timber industry leaders have also been wooed by the administration. A year ago, Trump’s then-campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and one of his campaign advisers, visited Freres Lumber Co. in the small Oregon town of Lyons to listen to industry concerns and talk up the president’s record.

Rob Freres, the company’s president, said the visit was another reminder of the administration’s concern for boosting the industry versus the antagonism he felt from the last two Democratic presidencies.

“We’ve been given a breather for four years,” Freres said, “with the hope that things will improve.”

Bernhardt and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose department oversees the U.S. Forest Service, have pushed for larger harvests on federal lands. Those public lands were once the largest source of wood for Oregon mills, but that’s changed since environmental protections put much of the federal forests — particularly those with old-growth trees — off limits for logging.

Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild, a Portland-based environmental group, said the change in the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management has been clear since Trump took office.

“We’ve experienced a real shift from a balanced approach that emphasized restoration, outdoor recreation and resource extraction,” said Pedery, the group’s conservation director, “to an approach that really emphasizes just logging, mining and grazing.”

But that did not mean the administration got its way. Instead, litigation was soon heating up at the courtroom door.

Oregon Wild and other environmental groups fought logging proposals they said would violate needed environmental protections. One was the 7,500-acre Crystal Clear logging sale on the east side of Mount Hood. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that, saying the U.S. Forest Service’s failure to perform an environmental impact statement was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Freres, the timber executive, said harvest levels are “inching upward.” But he said the Northwest Forest Plan — established by President Bill Clinton’s administration in 1994 after the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species — continues to keep much of the national forests closed to logging.

Portland forest economist Mark Rasmussen, who frequently works with the timber industry, said the harvest levels could be greatly increased on a sustainable basis.

“But no president has been able to make any difference on it in the national forests, as near as I can tell,” he said.Some think that could change in the wake of the massive wildfires that raged up and down the West Coast this summer. Public pressure is building for action aimed at finding ways to tackle the growing threat of cataclysmic fire. Trump and Republicans in Congress say the answer is to return to more intensive timber harvests, which they say is necessary to reduce fuel loads on overstocked forests.

Democratic lawmakers from the West Coast have focused more on providing more money for thinning and controlled burns while maintaining environmental protections and combating climate change that has fueled hotter weather. Democratic vice presidential nominee and California Sen. Kamala Harris has her own wildfire legislation; it focuses on providing federal money to better protect fire-prone communities.