MILESTONE WEEK President’s progress: Few concrete victories
WASHINGTON— As the first 100 days of his presidency draw to a close Saturday, Donald Trump cannot claimmany solid accomplishments, buthedoeshave one big one: He has held onto the support of the voters who put him in the WhiteHouse.
Trump has dominated the daily news cycle like few predecessors. Questions abound about whether he can manage the White House, sustain focus on a policy debate or set strategy for international relations, but he has proven he can hold the spotlight.
Partly because of that, his biggest impact may be the emotional effect he has had on the country.
With Trump on center stage, Republican confidence in the nation’s future and the state of its economy has increased sharply. On the other side of the partisan divide, he has mobilized and energized Democrats to a level not seen in years.
And in many immigrant communities, Trump’s rhetoric has generated fear, which likely has contributed to a drop in the number of people trying to cross the border illegally.
Trump’s impact looks small by comparison. Divisions within his party and opposition from Democrats havecombinedwith hisown errors to limit his effectiveness.
“Trump has focused on winning the short-term news cycle” every day, said UCLA political science professor LynnVavreck. “That’s an unusual strategy for someone governing.”
“Most people who want to be president of theUnited States have some long-term vision and want to lead to achieve that vision,” she said.
Trump , so far, has not set out that kind of goal, she said.
Democrats who believed Trump’s support might crumble have had their hopes dashed by the steadfastness of the president’s backers.
As result, the opening act of Trump’s presidency has unfolded as a highdecibel stalemate.
A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll provides evidence of the polarization andthe stability ofTrump’s support.
Over 90 percent of people nationwide who voted for Trump in November said theywould do so again.
But the poll, which last fall consistently forecast that Trump would win the election, found that just 40 percent of Americans approved of his job performance; 46 percent disapproved and 14 percent picked neither option.
More than a third, 35 percent, voiced strong disapproval of Trump, compared with 19 percent who strongly approve of him.
The survey was taken April 12-26 and questioned 3,039 Americans, of whom 2,584 reported that they had voted in the 2016 election. It has a margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction.
The poll’s findings on Trump’s job approval echo surveys by other news organizations and non-partisan polling groups. All have found approval of the president hovering around 40 percent — far less than any other elected president at this point in his tenure.
Americans split similarly on whether they like Trump personally: 37 percent said they do, 63 percent said they don’t, the poll found. About 1 in 6 of his own voters said they don’t like Trump personally, but approve of his policies.
In addition to the lateApril survey, the USC pollsters surveyed people in March. A comparison of the two shows something of a paradox: Among Trump’s voters, approval of his job performance has solidified even as doubts about him have begun to creep in.
In the earlier survey, about a third of Trump’s backers offered a wait-andsee answer when asked if they approved of Trump’s performance in office. By lateApril, their approvalhad firmed up, and 85 percent of those who voted for Trump now say they approve of his work.
But when asked whether “keeps his promises” was a phrase that applied to Trump, the results showed increased doubt. Between April and March, the share of Americans who said that Trump does keep his promises fell from 60 percent to 53 percent.
Among his own supporters, a significant number shifted from saying that keeping his promises “entirely applies” to the president to a more tentative “mostly applies.”
That decline squares with the evidence, if not with Trump’s ownrhetoric.
Trump, in recent comments, has tried to brush aside many campaign promises. Asked in an interview with the Associated Press about the detailed Contract with the American Voter that he released in the closing weeks of the campaign, along with a speech, in Gettysburg, Pa., Trump sought to distance himself fromthe pledges.
“Somebody put out the concept of a 100-day plan,” he said. “I’m mostly there on most items.”
“But things change,” added. “There has to flexibility.”
In truth, mostly there.
Of 30 major promises Trump made during his campaign, a survey by the Times found five that had Trump’s he be
isn’t been fulfilled. Many more have been scaled back and a few abandoned.
“There are not the usual accomplishments presidents like to point to,” said Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin, who studies the presidency.
Trump has appointed Neil Gorsuch, a conservative justice, to the Supreme Court to replace the late Antonin Scalia — a key promise for many of the conservative voters who backed him inNovember.
He formally pulled the U.S. out of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership tradedeal, a largely symbolic move since the pact was doomed in Congress.
And he put in place several promised ethics requirements for his staff, although the White House already has begun giving some people waivers from some of the restrictions.
After that, sparse.
Despite his party’s control of both houses of Congress, Trump has no big, early legislative accomplishments to point to. He has signed a number of bills, but all are small-scale measures, mostly to overturn regulations adopted in the final months of the Barack Obama administration.
Many pieces of legislation Trump promised to introduce within his first 100 days remain nowhere in sight.
DivisionsamongRepublicans in Congress have stymied his efforts to repeal Obama’s health care law, whichwas a central promise not only of Trump’s campaign, but of all Republican campaignssince the lawfirst passed in 2010.
He promised a major tax overhaul, which was unveiled Wednesday. He proposed dramatic cuts in corporate and personal taxes in
the
record
is an overhaul his administration asserts will spur national economic growth. But his plan alarmed lawmakers who worry it will balloon federal deficits.
Trump’s proposal for a $1 trillion plan to increase spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure has yet to materialize.
WhiteHouse officials defend his record.
“When you look at the number of pieces of legislation, the executive orders, business confidence, the place — the U.S. role in the world, there’s a lot that we feel — a lot of accomplishments that have occurred, and we feel very good about whatwe’ve done aswe head up to this first hundred days,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said thisweek.
At the same time, Spicer andothershavedownplayed the 100-day mark, calling it an “artificial number that gets thrown out.”
There’s little question that other presidents have achieved more in their early days. In 2001, Congress passed President George W. Bush’smajor tax cut inMay. President Obama won approval of his economic stimulus plan within his first 100 days, as well as a number of smaller-scale, substantive measures.
One of the biggest factors limiting Trump’s effectiveness — especially his ability to put forward ambitious legislative plans — has been his failure to staff key positions in his administration. Trump often blames Democrats for obstructing his nominees, but a much bigger part of the problem has beenhisownfailure toname people.
The non-partisan Partnership for Public Service has been tracking 554 highlevel positions that require Senate confirmation.
To date, Trumphas nominated 46, and another 35 have been named but not formally nominated. That’s far behind the pace of Obama, who had nominated nearly 200 by this point, or George W. Bush, who had nominated 85.
Lacking legislative accomplishments, Trump has relied heavily on executive orders, signing more in his first 14weeks than his recent predecessors.
But many of have provided than substance.
A review of the first 39 of Trump’s executive orders and presidential memorandums found that more than half simply ordered departments to study policy options and prepare reports.
The most consequential of the orders— theproposed ban on travel to the U.S. by residents of several majoritycountries — remains stalled in court. Only about a dozen of Trump’s decreeshave, so far, changed policy.
Trump has begun the process of rolling back Obama administration regulations, especially environmental rules, although much of what he has started will face court challenges.
And the administration has started to toughen immigration enforcement. The numberofimmigrants inthe country illegally who are in federal detention has increased, although only to about the level hit in 2014 before the Obama administration tightened rules on who immigration officials should target for arrest.
On Tuesday, a federal judge blockedTrump’s push to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that do not cooperate with immigration officials, saying the presidenthasnoauthority to attach new conditions to federal spending. those orders more show
The administration has backed away from other campaign pledges.
Trump has dropped his call to label China a “currency manipulator.”
He appears to have also dropped his pledge to scrap Obama’sDeferredAction for Child Arrivals, or DACA, program that shields from deportation some 750,000 young people living in the country illegally who came to the U.S. as children. He has taken no steps to undo the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran or its normalization of relations with Cuba.
The administration also appears headed toward a much narrower plan to negotiate changes in NAFTA, the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, than what Trump described on the campaign trail.
Moving away from campaign promises is risky for a president, and Trump is no exception.
Still, the USC/LA Times poll found that Trump’s votershavemostly remained with him.
That’s in keeping with a broader shift in presidential approval thatbecameapparent during the Obama years, both Vavreck and Azari noted. Presidential approval used to be driven heavily by events. President GeorgeW. Bush’s approval, for example, soared after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then fell after setbacks in the Iraq War.
Obama’s approval, however, barely budged for most of his eight years in office: Democrats backed him, Republicans opposed him, and very few developments changed minds on either side.
A similarly stubborn polarization has clearly taken hold with Trump, dividing opinions along the now familiar fault lines of American life.
In the poll, white Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, 49 percent to 36 percent, with 14 percent neutral. Among blacks, 7 percent approved and 82 percent disapproved, while among Latinos, 25 percent approved and 60 percent disapproved.
Asked if Trump “speaks for people like you,” 53 percent of whites said he did. Among blacks, 8 percent said so, among Latinos, 26 percent.
Trump gets solid support fromvoterswholive in rural areas, 54 percent of whom approve of his job performance, compared with 32 percent who disapprove. Among those who live in urban areas, almost the opposite is true, 28 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove.
Among Republicans, 80 percent said Trump “inspires confidence and optimism.” Among Democrats, only 12 percent said so.
More than half of Trump voters, 51 percent, now say they expect their personal financial condition to be better by next year. Before the election, only 29 percent expressed such optimism.
Among Hillary Clinton voters, expectations have not changed significantly, about 4 in 10 think they will see an improvement by next year.
Those opposing groups don’t share the samesources of information or the same beliefs about the world around them. Roughly twothirds of Trump voters, for example, said they believed the U.S. murder rate was at the highest point in 50 years, a staple of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. By contrast, about six in ten Clinton voters did not believe that.
In fact, the homicide rate for the past several years has been lower than at any point since the early 1960s.
When the poll asked about 10 potential sources of information, only two won the trust of a majority of Trump voters — Fox News andthe administration itself.
Jill Darling, survey director at USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, contributed.