Trump’s first 100 days a bit stormy Susan Page
But forecast ahead will be the true test of his potential
Think President Trump’s first 100 days were bumpy? Just wait for the 1,361 to follow.
It’s no surprise that Trump, who has been shattering political precedent since he announced his candidacy and then won the White House, would continue to break new ground once he moved into the Oval Office — though not always in a good way.
The courts have blocked his signature immigration ban. Congress has balked at delivering on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The FBI is investigating Russian meddling in the election, an issue that forced the resignation of his national security adviser and is likely to cast a shadow over the administration for months or more. The public gives him record-low approval ratings for a new president.
Braced for bad reviews when Trump reaches the unofficial milestone Saturday, the White House has been pushing back on the idea that his first 100 days have been a bust.
“No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!” the president
complained in an early-morning tweet Friday. A few days earlier, he bragged to a friendly audience at a manufacturing plant in Kenosha, Wis., that “no administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days.” And He has announced a “BIG” rally next Saturday in Harrisburg, Pa.
He points to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and the rollback of environmental and other regulations promulgated by the Obama administration as major achievements. He has promised a flurry of activity over the next few days, including the release of a “massive” tax-cut plan Wednesday and a news conference on veterans’ care Thursday.
Still, when press secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a briefing to name the most significant piece of legislation that had been enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress, he noted instead executive orders that had been signed and mentioned Gorsuch’s confirmation before finally citing a bill extending a program that helps veterans use health care providers outside the VA system.
Presidential historians and White House veterans say Trump has had one of the least-productive first 100 days in office of any modern president, and there’s lit- tle dispute that he has had the most tumultuous one.
The more important question is this: What does the president’s rocky beginning signal about the rest of his tenure?
His associates say Trump has become more sure-footed in his new role, although he continues to resist advice to stop airing his grievances on Twitter. His national-security team seems to be settling in, though conflicting signals on Syria and Iran and a “miscommunication” about just where an aircraft carrier group was headed has cost it credibility. He has ordered warring factions on the senior White House staff to work it out, or else.
But just what Trump will do on key issues, including several on which he staked out positions during the campaign, remains the subject of debate and dispute among his advisers — including decisions on precisely what the Obamacare replacement should
include and whether to break out of the Iran nuclear deal. Just how he’ll manage to put together a governing coalition in Congress is unclear, with a test looming over passing a spending bill to avert a government shutdown at the end of the week.
“At this point, I’d give him essentially a failing grade,” says Robert Dallek, a presidential historian who has written biographies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and others. His latest book, Franklin D.
Roosevelt: A Political Life, is being published in November. “There are no legislative accomplishments, zero,” and his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act “seems to be in suspended animation.”
To be sure, other modern presidents also have stumbled at the start.
“Recall that JFK began his administration with the Bay of Pigs, which is pretty much the gold standard for early fiascos,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a top domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton White House. “Bill Clinton of course stumbled into the gays-in-the-military discussion, which was hardly the way he wanted to begin.”
The question for Trump is whether the turmoil so far reflects an understandable learning curve or whether it’s the predictable result of a leadership style that includes a certain comfort with chaos. His opening months ce have had an exhausting pace as he seems to careen from controversy to controversy — many of them generated not by outside developments but by internal conflicts and provocative tweets.
Christopher Hill, dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a diplomat and State Department official in Democratic and Republican administrations from Jimmy Carter through Obama, says the president’s freewheeling management style and rhetoric, sometimes at odds with the facts, is creating angst among allies and adversaries abroad.
“There is an underlying problem that needs to be addressed in the next 1,000 days, and that is the degree to which you can take the word of the president to the bank,” Hill says.
It’s not just foreign leaders. Some of Trump’s natural allies in Congress and elsewhere also are struggling with mixed signals from a president whose ties to his own party are patchy.
“Donald Trump is in effect an independent president, elected under a Republican banner,” Galston says. That makes the calculus of the next 1,361 days complicated indeed.