Important or not, Trump’s first 100 days a bit lacking
Three weeks before winning the White House, President Trump gave a speech in Pennsylvania promising a “game-changing” first 100 days in office, predicting the “contract with the American voter” he outlined that day would persuade people to back him on Election Day.
On his 92nd day in office, Trump had a change of heart. Judging a president on his first 100 days in office, he said, was a “ridiculous standard.”
Whether you call that a flip-flop or a presidential learning moment, it was one of several reversals that illustrate the dominant theme of Trump’s first 100 days: Governing is much harder than campaigning.
Most of Trump’s early failures have been unforced errors by a rookie politician who spent his career at a family run business where he didn’t have to answer to an angry board of directors — let alone Congress, the courts and the media.
The candidate who sold himself to voters as the master dealmaker hasn’t been able to shepherd one significant piece of legislation into law, despite the fact that both houses of Congress are controlled by his party.
“Donald Trump has been average, maybe a little below average compared to other presidents since World War II,” said John Frendreis, a professor of political science at Loyola University in Chicago who has studied the first100-day records of presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt. “He hasn’t passed anything of real significance.”
But his supporters say he’s been true to the voters who carried him to the White House. Trump himself, in a speech this month in Wisconsin, said “no administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days” than his — a boast that the nonpartisan fact-checkers Politifact scored as “false.”
So far, Trump has kept only six of the 103 promises he made during the campaign, according to Politifact. All were unilateral actions that didn’t require approval by Congress.
He’s changed his mind on some of the signature positions he set out during the campaign, like on the value of NATO — now he says it’s valuable — and China as a currency manipulator — now he says it’s not.
He promised he would repeal the Affordable Care Act “on day one” of his term, but he and the GOP Congress fumbled their first chance to replace it.
“That was his domestic Bay of Pigs,” said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “He didn’t know what he was doing, and I don’t think he reckoned on the divisions in his own party.”
Perhaps most ominously for the crowds that chanted “build the wall” at his campaign rallies, Trump has backed off, at least for now, his demand for funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Yet for now, Trump appears solid among his core supporters.
During the campaign, Trump famously said his support was so strong that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” And that may remain true today. Only 2 percent of Trump voters say they regret backing him, according to a Washington Post/ABCNews poll out this week.
Analysts say Trump bought a lot of goodwill by fulfilling one of his key campaign promises — to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a conservative like the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Newly seated Justice Neil Gorsuch fits that description.
“Neil Gorsuch was a big deal. A really big deal,” said Lanhee Chen, a chief policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and a health-care official in George W. Bush’s administration.