Trump: ‘It’s a different kind of presidency’
At 100 days, president admits change won’t come quickly to Washington
WASHINGTON — For nearly 100 days, President Donald Trump has rattled Washington and been chastened by its institutions.
He’s startled world leaders with his unpredictability and tough talk, but won their praise for a surprise strike on Syria.
He’s endured the steady drip of investigations and a seemingly endless churn of public personnel drama.
“It’s a different kind of a presidency,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview, an hourlong conversation as he approached Saturday’s key presidential benchmark.
Trump, who campaigned on a promise of instant disruption, indirectly acknowledged that change doesn’t come quickly to Washington. He showed signs that he feels the weight of the office, discussing the “heart” required to do the job. Although he retained his signature bravado and a salesman’s confidence in his upward trajectory, he displayed an awareness that many of his own lofty expectations for his first 100 days in office have not been met.
“It’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful,” he said.
Trump waffled on whether he should be held accountable for the 100-day plan he outlined with great fanfare in his campaign’s closing days, suggesting his “Contract with the American Voter” wasn’t really his idea to begin with.
“Somebody put out the concept of a 100-day plan,” he said.
One hundred days are just a fraction of a president’s tenure, and no president has quite matched the achievements of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set the standard by which all are now judged.
Still, modern presidents have tried to move swiftly to capitalize upon the potent, and often fleeting, mix of political capital and public goodwill that usually accompanies their arrival in Washington.
Trump has never really had either.
A deeply divisive figure, he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton and had one of the narrower Electoral College victories in history. Since taking office on Jan. 20, his approval rating has hovered around 40 percent in most polls.
Trump’s early presidency has been dogged by FBI and congressional investigations into whether his campaign coordinated with Russians to tilt the race in his favor. It’s a persistent distraction that Trump would not discuss on the record.
Furthermore, his three monthsplus in office have amounted to a swift education in a world wholly unfamiliar to a 70-year-old who spent his career in real estate and reality television.
For example, his two disputed travel ban executive orders are languishing, blocked by federal judges.
On Capitol Hill, majority Republicans muscled through Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, but had to blow up long-standing Senate rules to do so. Then there was the legislative debacle when Trump’s own party couldn’t come together to fulfill its long-sought promise of repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law.
But he acknowledged that being commander in chief brings with it a “human responsibility” that he didn’t much bother with in business, requiring him to think through the consequences his decisions have on people and not simply the financial implications for his company’s bottom line.
“When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria,” Trump said of his decision to strike a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack. “I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, this is more than just like 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that’s involved because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved.’”
It’s too soon to say whether the presidency has changed Trump in substantive ways. He’s backpedaled on an array of issues in recent weeks, including his critiques of NATO and his threats to label China a currency manipulator. But his self-proclaimed flexibility means he could move back to where he started just as quickly.