100 DAYS – SO HOW’S HE DOING?
From Twitter rants to campaign promises, we take a look at the tumultuous start to the Trump presidency
HE MADE a lot of huge promises on the campaign trail. Washington, DC, Donald Trump told voters, was like a swamp of greed, corruption and incompetence that needed draining – and he was the guy to do it.
So confident was he in his abilities to sweep clean that he even laid out a 100day action plan, a blueprint he referred to as “my contract with the American voter”.
Well, 100 days have come and gone and few of Trump’s promises have been fulfilled. Where is the wall he promised to build between America and Mexico? Not a brick has been laid. As for his bold plan to repeal Obamacare, his predecessor Barack Obama’s health insurance programme – well, he’s also had to put that on hold.
Trump’s first weeks saw him hitting the ground running as he signed a flurry of executive orders. Then, amid a barrage of criticism, he seemed to run out of steam. Key election promises were abandoned as he found himself hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape and sometimes even open rebellion within the ranks of his own Republican party.
Political analysts reckon Trump (70) is learning the hard way that it’s not so easy to get things done in Washington – especially when you’re a newcomer who’s never held public office.
“He’s discovering, as presidents before him have, that checks and balances are a very real thing,” says Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Over the past three months Trump has often found himself on the back foot, backed into a corner defending himself or putting out fires largely of his own making. Despite his promise that during his term there would be less talk and
more action, he’s wasted a lot of time giving interviews and bizarre speeches. And in between he also somehow found time to fire off more than 650 tweets.
His latest Twitter posts saw him taking aim at “the ridiculous standard” of measuring a president’s performance by his first 100 days. Huh? But isn’t this what he asked everyone to do?