100 days? Seems longer
Richard Fulton
President Trump may be right that the “first 100 days” mark is arbitrary as a means for judging a new president. Yet, this has been a touchstone for evaluating new presidents since Franklin Roosevelt.
Not to mention that it was Trump, himself, who set up this guidepost when he was running for the presidency. He was going to do so much “on the first day” that he set expectations rather high.
How has he done? His style has thrown off the aura of domestic politics and bewildered the rest of the world. The campaign bombastic style resinated with his base constituency enough to gain him the presidency so he continues to use it.
Once in office he has, if you are charitable, shown a capacity to learn. If you are skeptical, he has demonstrated world-class flip-flopping. He has either modulated or simply reversed his stands on several of his key campaign pledges.
NATO is out of date he claimed, but is now miraculously relevant. China is a trade cheat, but now the Chinese president is his buddy. All of Obamacare must go; except now he accepts the more popular elements of the plan.
Pick an area of promise and he has either flopped or modified his views. I particularly like the clip from the campaign where he said he would not have time to leave the White House because he would be busy with the country’s business full time.
Still, it is his policies that are important. He has not gotten any of his key pieces of legislation through congress even though Republicans dominate both houses. His health care replacement of Obamacare bombed in the House because Republicans could not get their act together.
His large success has been the nomination and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as an associate member of the Supreme Court.
Other successes have been relatively minor and have come through his use of Executive Orders (those things he and Republicans railed against when Obama used them). He gave the go ahead for the Keystone oil pipeline, attacked the entry of immigrants into the U.S. with various administrative orders, and directed the withholding of monies to so-called sanctuary cities.These latter have run into problems with the courts who have found some not in the president’s purview and others simply not constitutional.
Foreign and military policy have been a mixed bag. He pledged in his campaign to “bomb the hell” out of Syria and followed through with a barrage on one of its air fields. It was an warning which still needs to be a proven successful.
And, of course, he dropped the “mother of all bombs” on the Taliban in Afghanistan. An act that the official Afghan leaders did not like at all. Most alarming has been the baiting of North Korea into a near confrontation.
Lowering taxes has been a key pledge of the president. The outline of his plan was announced this week. Basically, though, there are only broad specifics given. He wants to lower the tax rates on businesses from a high of 35 percent down to 15 percent. Many critics on the left and the right and neutral economists say this will result in a $3 trillion addition to the national debt in the next decade.
For individual tax rates, he wants to cut the seven levels now used to three: 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent. The lowest rate today is 10 percent, so the poor get it in the pocketbook again. There are many details, but not nearly enough for such a complex subject.
It is telling that, much like the attempt to dump Obamacare, many Republicans already are skeptical. One key GOP aide is quoted as saying the plan is “not even close to reform.”
The first 100 days, then, found some success but no major changes in law or in key programs that Trump pledged to redo on “day one.” And we seem closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the cold war.
Richard Fulton is an emeritus professor of political science.
