Trump was right. There, I said it.

It could be and it was. Here is the CNN headline from 2019: “Senate approves Ivanka Trump-backed paid family leave for federal employees.”

You may not be feeling it, but the long nightmare of Trumpism is winding down. Not quickly enough, to be sure. But it is not too early to both look forward and backward: Will anything good have come of these eight years of buffoonery, mismanagement, and runaway corruption?

Yes. I think a modicum of intellectual honesty will have to allow that Donald Trump got some things right. There is of course the broad category of things Trump was right about, e.g. the bloated federal government, but had no idea how to remedy.

Even his cheapo, cash-and-carry drug website Trump Rx (everything must be named for Trump, always) probably isn’t a bad idea for the millions of Americans without health insurance, or with dodgy drug coverage. Too bad A) it’s not valid in Massachusetts and B) no one seems to have heard of it.

What about these, pardon my French, Trump accounts for American newborns? Like Trump Rx, these savings accounts were either unknown or misunderstood, so the administration recently borrowed an idea from Nobel Prize-winning economic behaviorist Richard Thaler: The way to get people to save is to force them to save. Now newborn children are automatically enrolled in the program, with $1,000 in the bank.

The accounts are a fine idea. For instance, philanthropies can donate. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has committed $6.25 billion to the 530A accounts of children who live in less affluent ZIP codes. Those children now have a $1,250 start toward what could become a retirement account. The New York Times explained the program succinctly: “It serves as a collection basket to receive free money.”

Of course Trump still has plenty of time to bollix this program up. Almost everything he touches turns to crap. On the other hand, I can envisage parents waking up 15 years from now and discovering a small nest egg in their children’s name. “Where did that come from?” they might ask. It came from Trump.

Trump’s disgraceful sabre-rattling over Greenland has ended in a negotiated settlement that seems to have satisfied the many disparate stakeholders, i.e. NATO, Denmark, and Greenland itself. He took the long way around — as always — but in this case, with what promises to be a positive result.

And then there’s Trump’s superbly qualified nominations to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett aren’t exactly lionized in liberal New England, but there’s not a legal dolt among them.

Whiling away my life on Instagram, I came upon Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman’s assessment of Barrett, whom he knew as a fellow Supreme Court law clerk: “She is legally, technically, a genius. She is one of the strongest lawyers I’ve ever encountered in my entire career.”

The Supreme Court’s completely unhidden agenda is to dismantle the federal regulatory state. A side project is to unfetter the power of the presidency, not just of Trump, but also of his successors. I oppose and/or revile many of the Trump court’s decisions, but they’ve gotten plenty of things right. They have held the line on birthright citizenship, tariffs, and state control over federal elections … for now.

My superannuated crew of New England Patriots fans were watching Sunday’s game, trying for the hundredth time to decipher the weird new freeze-tag kickoff return rule. “It looks like hell,” Trump famously commented. “Who comes up with these ridiculous ideas?”

Who indeed? “Trump was right about that,” one of my friends grumbled. Indeed he was.

Alex Beam is a contributing Globe Opinion writer. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.