The following article by David Cantanese was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website April 27, 2017:
Lacking a signature legislative accomplishment, the new president has been left to govern largely by rhetorical bluster.
He is without a crowning legislative achievement. His approval rating has hit a historic low. And his nebulous governing philosophy appears to be driven primarily by in-the-moment impulse rather than long-term strategic outlook.
Yet more than anything else, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have demonstrated the limits of one president’s power. Regardless of his unorthodox and capricious approach, and for all his promises of rapid and earth-shattering upheaval, Trump is finding himself bedeviled by fairly conventional political problems.
Even for Trump opponents who feared the apocalypse, it hasn’t happened.
“The administration has actually managed to get done relatively little in the malevolence department largely because it can’t get anything done,” Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, said during a recent discussion hosted by the Washington think tank.
In Congress, the 45th president has been stifled by his own party on repealing Obamacare.
In the courts, he’s been thwarted by federal judges who have halted his travel ban twice and most recently struck down his effort to cut funding to “sanctuary cities” that protect people in the country illegally.
From Syria to China, he’s abandoned core campaign commitments now that he’s been faced with the harsh realities of a complex and perilous world.
And he remains under the nagging cloud of an FBI investigation, stemming from his campaign’s potential ties to Russian operators that meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s been one of the worst 100 days since we started tracking it in the 1930s with FDR,” says presidential historian and Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley. “It’s almost been completely void of true accomplishments.”
Trump has pre-emptively derided the media-driven, artificial 100-day marker for his achievements, noting to The Associated Press that it took President Barack Obama “17 months to do Obamacare … I had to get like a little bit of grounding, right?”
But it is Trump himself who eagerly embraced this “game-changing” timeline as a candidate, rolling out a splashy 100-day agenda and even at times conveying how easy it would be to achieve his initiatives. Yet of the 38 specific promises Trump made in his 100-day contract, the AP found he’s accomplished only 10.
Confronted by the same congressional intransigence that has plagued many a president before him, he has turned inward to the power of the Oval Office, conducting 14 weeks of business principally by the stroke of executive order, a tactic he previously derided.
Trump has signed more than two dozen executive orders since taking office, averaging about two a week and focusing heavily on exhaustive reviews of agencies, the stringent enforcement of existing statutes or, conversely, the evisceration of Obama-era actions. Many orders simply serve as directives to identify and prepare for future reforms down the road. It’s all meant to place the president in a perpetual state of motion, with officials boasting it’s the most orders signed in the first 100 days of a new administration since World War II.
Essentially, though, the fleet of mandates could be seen as a substitute for a lack of legislative breakthroughs.
“It’s definitely a fallback position,” says H.W. Brands, a University of Texas professor and author of two dozen books on American presidents and U.S. history. “They wished they could’ve had health care reform and maybe tax reform by now and maybe infrastructure, but they didn’t get it. Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it’s what they persuade Congress to do.”
Through these executive orders, Trump is attempting to make good on his pledge to take a hatchet to the administrative state. One calls for agencies to eliminate two regulations for each new one created. Another pushes the Treasury Department to identify burdensome financial regulations. Still one more prods agencies to expedite permitting for infrastructure. If fully implemented together, experts say Trump’s orders could amount to the most dramatic regulatory rollback since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
But aside from their fundamental impermanence, these orders also are not immediate, partly because the White House has been slow to populate its administration with people tasked with implementing its directives. The Washington Post reported this week that aside from Cabinet secretaries, the president had advanced just 37 nominees for 530 vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation.
“I think the slow pace of nominations is going to constrain his ability to meet the deadlines” on regulatory rollbacks, Susan Dudley, director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, said during a recent panel at conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
Dudley added that any change or undoing of a regulation takes “at least a year,” and that all of Trump’s actions “are likely to be litigated.”
When it comes to being rebuffed by Congress, Trump isn’t unique. What’s startling about his lack of early momentum, though, is that he’s dealing with a favorable hand: GOP majorities in both chambers.
A repeal of Obamacare is now on its second attempt, and even if it manages to squeak through the House, it faces a potentially steeper hill to climb in a closely divided Senate. The administration’s timeline for tax reform – once set for 100 days, then pushed to before August and most recently nudged to the end of the year – is indicative of the task’s inherent and sweeping complexity. A single-page plan released Wednesday by the White House was void of key details and signaled a long road ahead.
Lisa Nelson, CEO of the conservative-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council, recently poured cold water on the potential for transformative tax reform, telling a Committee for Economic Development policy conference, “Do I think it’s going to happen? Probably not. But it’s such a missed opportunity.”
On other issues, an infrastructure package to rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges might have attracted bipartisan support at the outset, but the closer the calendar creeps to 2018 – a midterm election year – the less incentive Democrats will have to hand Trump anything
There’s also been no funding thrown toward Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico – one of his most incessant campaign promises – and The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single member of Congress who represents southwest border territory said they support Trump’s related $1.4 billion budget request. The public isn’t interested in the wall, either: 58 percent of Americans oppose it, according to one survey.
“He’s got R’s all over the place and can’t get anything done,” Brinkley says. “His big legislative gambit turned up a zero. He keeps moving the marker.”
Trump’s foreign policy, meanwhile, has been “a mixed bag,” Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense in President George W. Bush’s administration, said at the Heritage Foundation event.
His appointments of Jim Mattis as secretary of defense and H.R. McMaster as national security adviser have earned broad acclaim due to the veteran military men’s seriousness, experience and intellect. And the April 6 strike on Syria in the wake of a brutal chemical attack ascribed to President Bashar Assad received bipartisan approval.
But foreign policy hands are still struggling to understand Trump’s worldview and how he’ll employ the levers of military might and hard-line diplomacy.
In explaining the U.S. stance on Assad’s future following the Syrian air base strike, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered strikingly differing messages on the Sunday news shows, indicating an alarming lack of strategic coherence.
And after issuing harsh rhetoric against China during the campaign, Trump has warmed to Beijing as a pliable negotiating partner on trade and resolving the North Korean nuclear threat. He’s also taken swifter trade action against Canada rather than Mexico, his favored foil, while sending signals to Russia that have varied greatly – from gradations of admiration to an allegation of potential incompetence.
“What we’ve seen has sort of been national security by instinct instead of by expertise, so it’s been just remarkably uneven,” Susan Hennessey, a national security expert, observed during the Brookings discussion this week.
Still, there are some areas of daylight Trump can rightfully point to.
One irrefutable victory is the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose generational legacy is almost certain to far outlast the president’s. The selection, which was widely applauded by conservatives and subsequent approval of Gorsuch provided a rare unifying moment for a Republican Party that remains riven with divisions even as it enjoys paramount power.
The significant drop in illegal southwest border crossings – with apprehensions down 60 percent when comparing numbers the month of the election to those in February of this year – appears tied to the president’s harsh rhetoric and stern warnings of deportations. While Trump ordered the hiring of enforcement agents at the outset of his tenure, some see his tough oratory as the primary driver of the decrease.
“He hasn’t built a wall and maybe he won’t built a wall. He is the wall. The numbers have just dropped like a rock on illegal immigration,” says Doug Wead, a conservative historian and a former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush.
Wead says this Trumpian impact also applies to the economy: Unemployment has declined, U.S. stock indexes have hit record highs and consumer confidence has been strong.
“Compare it to Reagan – he just got elected and they let the hostages go,” Wead says, referring to the Iranian hostage crisis. “That’s what I see happening in business. I think he’s turned around the economy based on companies that are willing to stay here, hire American.”
Perhaps more significantly, the disconnect between Washington’s perception of Trump and that of the country elsewhere appears only to have hardened since his election.
While it’s true that pollsters have measured Trump’s approval rating at the lowest recorded point at this stage of a presidency dating back to Dwight Eisenhower’s tenure, it’s also true that his core base has remained steadfast with him.
In Indiana, blue-collar workers confronted with layoffs as their jobs move to Mexico still expressed support for Trump, even though he couldn’t protect their livelihood. Social conservatives are overjoyed by his actions restricting international funding for abortions and rescinding guidance allowing transgender students to use the public bathroom corresponding to their gender identity.
Ninety-three percent of Trump voters measured by a University of Virginia Center for Politics poll approve of the way the president is doing his job. And most Republican and independent voters in four key states said they wouldn’t punish the party in 2018 for failing to deliver on Trump’s key initiatives, according to a survey by the GOP-leaning Firehouse Strategies.
“The people who don’t watch ‘Morning Joe’ [on MSNBC] in the morning are people who think he’s doing quite well,” said Bob Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman turned Washington lobbyist.
Trump also still has time to put points on the board. Reagan didn’t score his historic tax reform until the summer of 1981. President George W. Bush knows better than anyone that history can alter the trajectory and purpose of a presidency in a mere instant.
But in order to ultimately succeed, Trump will need more cogent and compelling pitches to Congress, a smoother organizational operation, a revival of his renowned dealmaking skills, avoidance of a crippling development on collusion with Russia – and a little luck.
No one expects miracles in the first 100 days, but each day going forward makes the legislative lift a bit more cumbersome. For a president obsessed with his own headlines, ratings and scores, the dearth of century-mark accomplishments probably won’t be humbling to Trump.
“He’s discovering what every president discovers: It’s a lot harder to be president than he
“The administration has actually managed to get done relatively little in the malevolence department largely because it can’t get anything done.” Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution.
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