Remember this boast? “We’re going to win. We’re going to win so much. We’re going to win at trade, we’re going to win at the border. We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’ ”
President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office ended this weekend, leaving him without a significant win. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court could be considered an exception, but even that occurred only because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, lacking the traditional 60 votes needed, exercised the so-called nuclear option.
Elsewhere in these pages, Monitor reporters Ella Nilsen and Elodie Reed described the impacts, real and potential, of Trump’s presidency on New Hampshire. They aren’t positive. The same can be said for his impact on the nation and the world.
Measuring a president by the accomplishments of a term’s first 100 days is an arbitrary marker. Trump decried the standard as “ridiculous,” yet he desperately wanted his first three months in office to be deemed a success. They weren’t. Despite Republican control of the House and Senate, no significant legislation – not the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, not a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, not the construction at Mexico’s expense of a “beautiful” border wall – was enacted.
It’s true, as his spokesman Sean Spicer said, that Trump signed more bills in his first 100 days than any president since Harry Truman. Virtually none of them were consequential. Many, like the three bills nominating members to the board of the Smithsonian Institution, were rushed through to earn bragging rights. Everything Trump does involves bragging rights. Many bills undid regulations, tougher pollution rules, for example, put in place during Obama’s administration.
Trump mocked then President Obama for his use of executive orders, saying, “We have a president who can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” So far Trump has governed largely through executive orders. He has signed at last count 25, or almost one every three days.
The economy has yet to see a Trump bump. The gross domestic product, at 0.7 percent, grew at the slowest rate in three years during his first three months. Job creation on his watch has been average, and few if any companies have returned jobs to the United States,
The government is running on inertia. Trump has nominated people to fill only 50 of the 553 executive branch jobs that opened with Obama’s departure. The appointments Trump has made have largely been awful: Scott Pruitt, a career foe of the EPA now heads the agency; Rick Perry, who as a candidate pledged to eliminate the Department of Energy, now leads it; Jeff Sessions, a foe of civil rights as state attorney general and then a senator, is the attorney general.
As a candidate, Trump excoriated Wall Street then chose, as his financial advisers, three men who once worked for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs. The closest advisers to a president with no previous government experience are his daughter and son-in-law, neither of whom ever served in government either. Trump has presented a rough outline of a plan to change the tax code but he won’t release his tax returns, which could show whether the plan would benefit him and his family.
Globally, the world is on pins and needles, waiting to see what the impulsive and unpredictable leader of the free world will do. In his first three months Trump has offended or alienated the leaders of four American allies – Germany, Australia, Mexico and Canada. He is playing with nuclear fire in North Korea. His campaign’s potential collusion with Russia to affect the outcome of the presidential election is under investigation.
The best word to describe this president’s first 100 days is “surreal.”