Can’t-do president gins up can-do frenzy for Day 100
Gail Collins
Well, heck, who said Donald Trump wasn’t going to accomplish anything in his first 100 days? All of a sudden there’s a one-page tax plan and a raft of deal-making, while the Senate was bused over to the White House grounds for a briefing on North Korea.
Maybe the president believes that when you can make an entire chamber of Congress ride around like so many tour groups, the world will understand that you’re a can-do kind of guy.
Trump wasn’t actually in public for any of this. Outside of congratulating the National Teachers of the Year, the man himself was in sight only for events in which he announced that a Cabinet member had been directed to look into something.
On Day 97, Trump first appeared before the cameras to tell us the secretary of the interior was going to review previous presidents’ habit of saving federal lands from development. Federal land, Trump reminded the audience, “belongs to all of us.” He then called for turning it over to the states.
His recent predecessors have tried to defend places like a gorgeous section of Utah called Grand Staircase-Escalante by declaring them national monuments. You can do that because of a law called the Antiquities Act that goes back to Theodore Roosevelt. Republicans love to brag about Theodore Roosevelt, except when he was protecting the wilderness.
Everybody knows that Trump wants a can-do record when he hits Day 100 today. To get there, he appeared to be adopting the garb of Somewhat Normal Republican. The House leaders were working out an agreement with conservatives on health care, tossing people with pre-existing ailments over the rail. The administration seemed ready to make a deal with Democrats to keep the government running. And his new tax plan is almost identical to the approach his recent Republican predecessors have taken, which is to cut the heck out of revenue and to hell with the deficit.
“The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth,” said Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.
The idea that huge tax cuts will gin up the economy so much that everything will balance out is a beloved fairy tale.
For a man who loves drama, Trump’s domestic role lately has been super-undramatic. While the senators were getting off their buses, Trump went before the cameras to announce that he had directed the secretary of education to investigate whether there were too many federal regulations of public schools.
It’s a bit ironic that Trump makes such a show of directing his Cabinet members to do things when the administration hasn’t gotten around to nominating their top staff.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are gearing up for battle on the tax cuts — once they figure out exactly what they are. The super-easy response is just to say that before Trump asks Congress to do anything, he should show us his taxes. This came up at the press conference, and Mnuchin’s response was approximately the same as if someone suggested his boss might want to disembowel puppies.
“The president has released plenty of information and I think has given more financial disclosure than anybody else,” he said quickly and with deep inaccuracy. Charles Krauthammer
Yesterday’s conventional wisdom: A wave of insurgent populism is sweeping the West, threatening its foundational institutions — the European Union, the Western alliance, even liberal democracy itself.
Today’s conventional wisdom (post-first-round French presidential election): The populist wave has crested, soon to abate.
Chances are that both verdicts are wrong. The anti-establishment sentiment that gave us Brexit, then Donald Trump, then seemed poised to give us Marine Le Pen, has indeed plateaued. But although she will likely be defeated in the second round, victory by the leading centrist, Emmanuel Macron,