Syria strike, travel ban, Obamacare: Some wins, some humiliating defeats

WASHINGTON: Worried by the prospect of being scored poorly on his first 100 days in office, US President Donald Trump took to his favourite megaphone to prepare the grounds for it last week: it’s a “ridiculous standard” he fumed on Twitter, adding that no matter how much he accomplished — “it’s been quite a lot”, he threw in helpfully — he will be killed by the media.

The next day, when he felt somewhat reassured perhaps, the president announced a “big rally” in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the day he completed 100 days in office, which also happened to be the night of the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association, which Trump was skipping, over a fraught relationship with the media.

Very soon the administration was queuing up as many accomplishments as it could to prove not only that Trump had done well, but that he had outperformed his predecessors — 30 executive orders, which was the most by any president in decades, said a White House note.

It was titled “President Trump’s 100 days of historic achievements”. And, “Despite historic Democrat obstructionism”, the note said Trump worked with Congress to pass more legislation in his first 100 days than any president since Harry S Truman.

Numbers matter to the tycoon, but these numbers concealed more than they showed.

While Trump struck down presumably debilitating government regulations, froze government hirings, rolled back his predecessor’s climate-related restrictions and ordered a review of H-1B temporary visa programme with these orders, as he had promised as a candidate, he also stumbled or failed to come good on some others.

Chiefly, an executive order he signed January 27 temporarily barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US and blocking all refugees. As egregious as it was in letter and spirit, it was a campaign promise the administration blew up through amateurish handling, leading to chaos at airports around the United States and abroad, international outrage and court injunction and stay.

It was dead very soon. And its replacement, a narrower order, also ran into trouble with courts.

The White House memo extolling the president’s legislative achievements did not, because it could not in that existing format, capture the spectacular failure of the president, and the Republican party that now controlled both chambers of Congress, to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s legacy healthcare legislation that Republicans had railed and ran against since its passage in 2011.

Still smarting from the setback, the Trump administration has tried to resurrect the effort in recent days with mixed prospects of passage.

But what will he tell them about China, a country he had raged against as a candidate, accusing it of “raping America” among other things? He seemed to have changed his mind since assuming office, and hosting Chinese president Xi Jinping and his wife at his Florida resort.

The most unifying and defining moment of the Trump administration came when he launched cruise missiles to hit a Syrian airfield that was used by the country’s air force to drop chemical weapons on a rebelcontrolled part of the country.

The strikes struck a chord with the country, and was welcomed even by his fiercest critics on the left who had felt frustrated by President Obama’s failure to follow through on his threat of US retaliation to Syrian used of chemical weapons.

But, remember, this is just about 100 days.