Ambitious goals run into reality
Lacking legislation and party unity, political novice fails to fulfill many campaign promises
WASHINGTON — If President Trump meets his own benchmark of success, by his 100th day as president on Saturday, he will have proposals in Congress to replace the Affordable Care Act, provide middleclass tax relief, reform ethics rules to reduce the influence of special interests and fund a wall on the Mexico border.
A plan to revitalize the nation’s infrastructure and to provide school choice to parents and make college more affordable would have also been sent to Congress. They were all part of a package of bills candidate Trump promised in October would be moved during his first 100 days in office. Reality has fallen short. When Trump arrived in Washington in January, he had not fleshed out any legislation, much less laid the groundwork for its passage.
“He didn’t have proposals ready to go,” said Eric Schickler,
a UC Berkeley political scientist. “I think they were so surprised by winning. And given his own approach to governing, they didn’t really spend the transition building a legislative program and trying to get consensus around it. That led them to veer from one thing to another without really doing the legwork you need to do.”
Little has changed since then. This past week, leading to a 100-day benchmark that Trump has simultaneously heralded and dismissed, the administration has engaged in a frantic effort to show progress on its marquee issues, rolling out a major tax proposal, pushing for a new vote on health care, issuing executive orders to review 21 years of national monument designations and re-opening Atlantic and Arctic drilling.
The tax plan was a one-page outline, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called it “the biggest tax cut and the largest tax reform in the history of our country” that would pay for itself through economic growth. Deficit-hawk groups often aligned with the GOP swiftly disagreed.
“This isn’t anything like a fully formed tax reform plan,” said Steve Ellis, head of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “This appears to be some tax treats from the dessert portion of the tax-reform menu.” The losses in revenue on the face of it would make congressional passage difficult.
Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat and senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said the Trump proposal conflicts with GOP plans his committee chair has been working on and proves “once again,” that the administration and the Republican majority in Congress “aren’t on the same page or even reading from the same book.”
The failure on health care was particularly jarring, both for the White House and Capitol Hill Republicans after years of GOP promises to “repeal Obamacare,” and Trump’s own promise to do so immediately and on “day one.”
“You had a guy who came with the goal of a fantastic health plan that would cover lots of people, but he didn’t have a clear set of policy tools or political steps to get there,” said Thad Kousser, a political scientist at UC San Diego.
So Trump turned to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a libertarian-leaning opponent of big government, despite a history of friction between the two. Ryan’s plan, rushed to the floor without vetting, proved wildly unpopular and stalled in the House. Trump finally delivered an ultimatum to proceed with a vote or the Affordable Care Act would remain in place. Instead, Ryan withdrew the legislation.
In the midst of the battle, Trump declared, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
Despite a flurry of activity this week on a second version of a replacement to the Affordable Care Act that has won over conservatives, Ryan said Thursday the House would not be voting on it any time soon. Instead, he spoke of a “200-day agenda.” Meanwhile, the powerful health care and advocacy groups, such as AARP and the American Medical Association, that helped kill the first version of the plan remain opposed to its second iteration.
Not all of the problem lies with Trump, many analysts said. The debacle on health care exposed divisions among Republicans, mainly between Tea Party conservatives, concentrated in the House Freedom Caucus, and establishment Republicans. Many have never served under a president of their own party.
“I think you’re experiencing some growing pains in the White House, which are normal, contrary to popular belief, but also in Congress,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “They’re still learning to be the governing party.”
Republicans “are more divided than people had realized,” Schickler said. “The rise of the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus means there is a big faction that’s just quite far to the right, but at the same time, to hold their majority, they need to hold on to about 20 to 30 members from moderate districts” that voted for Hillary Clinton for president.
That means Republican leadership has to find a legislative balance between the two groups. “That’s proving to be a big challenge,” Schickler said.
Trump’s own ideology can be hard to pin down. His populist campaign promised to upend party orthodoxies, but many of his pro-business policies — and those of the party establishment — are neither populist nor popular among Trump’s base of working-class voters.
“He’s not a principled conservative,” said Stanford University political scientist Bruce Cain. “He’s kind of all over the map, and without the support of Democrats, he really has to resolve the dynamics inside the Republican Party to realize anything really big.”
Yet as rocky as his presidency’s start has been, Trump has also scored significant victories, from a dramatic 61 percent plunge in border apprehensions to Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
His legislative record is also better than it seems at first blush. Trump has signed 11 bills including measures that permanently ban rules that protect Appalachian streams from coal-mining waste, stop the mentally disabled from buying guns, and prevent Internet service providers from selling customers’ browsing history without their consent, among other things.
Still, these required little in the way of legislative strategy, because none required more than a simple majority vote in the Senate under a law that allows Congress to repeal recent rules enacted by the Obama administration. House Republicans made the revocations a priority at the start of the year and had them lined up to send to Trump soon after he took office.
The drop in border apprehensions came not from changes in law, but tougher enforcement of existing laws, said Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
But as for Trump’s difficulties with Congress, some blame his and his top staff ’s inexperience in governing along with the administration’s tardiness in filling sub-Cabinet job positions.
Cam Witten, a lobbyist with the Wilderness Society, an environmental group, has been tracking the spending bill that will fund the government for the rest of this year. He said negotiations with Congress have seemed “very disjointed” because of a lack of administration participation.
“Generally the White House is pretty engaged back and forth with the leadership,” he said, but not this year. “It seems a bit odd the way ultimatums are fired off over Twitter or via administration spokespeople, but the folks in the room in negotiations are hearing things first from the press. It’s just been a weird back-and-forth.”
Amid those negotiations, Trump at first insisted he get funding for his border wall. When that promised to lead to a government shutdown on his 100-day anniversary, he quickly retreated, while insisting, “The wall is going to get built.”
Despite the setbacks, polls show Trump’s voters remain solidly behind him. And Trump has shown, Cain said, that he does not give up easily, renewing his push on health care even after threatening to “move on.”
“It’s premature to say Republicans can’t get their act together,” Cain said. “They’re not going to be able to do all the things they want, but the realization will kick in at some point that they risk squandering the whole two years (before the midterm elections) and not get anything major done and lose control of one or both houses of Congress.”