Donald Trump won the presidential campaign by breaking all the rules, and so it’s tempting
to imagine that the rules no longer applied to him.
His presidency was unpredictable.
That he could do things no one had done before.
Well, we’re now about 100 days into Trump’s presidency, and we’re learning, and maybe
more importantly he is learning, that what works in a campaign, when your strategy is
get the most TV time possible, it doesn’t really work when you’re governing.
And there’s a lesson here, a lesson for Trump and a lesson for those who will come
after him: The campaign might be turning into a reality TV show, but governing still isn’t.
The same things Trump did to win attention as a candidate, and to show he wasn’t a
normal politician, that’s what’s breaking him as a president.
It’s worth digging deep into his record so far.
Health care, Trump’s top priority, it crashed and burned, and it crashed and burned because
Trump didn’t understand the American Health Care Act.
He didn’t know what his legislation did, he didn’t seem to realize it broke almost
all of his promises, it was wildly unpopular, and he didn’t have a good argument to make
it more popular.
He didn’t get the the legislative maneuvering needed to pass it.
So he ended up endorsing an incredibly, incredibly unpopular piece of legislation and then declared
defeat after only 17 days.
I have milk that lasted longer than Trump’s health care bill.
And yeah, he keeps talking about bringing it back, but he still doesn’t have a strategy,
he has no new ideas to make it more popular or make it a better bill, and doesn’t even
seem to understand why the first bill failed in the first place.
Perhaps because of all that, Trump is historically, incredibly unpopular.
Less than three months into his presidency, he is less popular than Obama was at any point.
To underscore how dubious of an achievement he has here, Trump is more unpopular with
unemployment at 4.7 percent than Obama was when unemployment was 10 percent.
It took President George W. Bush a disastrous war to hit Trump’s current polling nadir.
This makes everything else Trump wants to achieve harder — vulnerable congressional
Republicans have little political incentive to back a president this unpopular on a hard
vote.
Trump’s most consequential executive orders are stuck in the courts and imperiled by his
own words.
So far, Trump’s most unusual and controversial policy change is his executive order banning
travelers from a number of majority-Muslim countries.
But the slapdash first iteration of that order was stopped by the courts, and the substantially
scaled-back sequel suffered the exact same fate.
And the biggest problem here, the reason his executive orders keep getting stopped by the
courts is Trump.
It is the things Trump himself said.
TRUMP: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering
the United States.”
And, for that matter, the things his surrogates say he said.
Giuliani: “So when he first announced it, he said 'Muslim ban.'
He called me up.
He said, 'Put a commission together.
Show me the right way to do it legally.'
"
Having said he wanted an (unconstitutional) Muslim ban and then having Rudy Giuliani confirm
it on television, it’s difficult for Trump to now convince the courts that the policies
descending from that promise are not targeting Muslims.
Because of course they are.
Trump’s administration, meanwhile, is historically understaffed.
Critical positions ranging from chief economist to undersecretary of state remain unfilled,
and so large swaths of the executive branch are operating without direction, oversight,
or alignment with Trump’s agenda.
This is why there’s something comic about Trump appointing his son-in-law to lead a
task force on improving government: To build a better government, first you need to understand
how to work the one you’ve got.
Trump’s key staff have also dissolved into infighting and factionalism; they are leaking
constantly to the press.
You have a war between the conservative wing of the Trump administration — led by
the often-squabbling Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon — they’re trying to head off a
power play from the New York business wing of the Trump administration, led by Jared
Kushner and ex–Goldman Sachs vice president Gary Cohn.
Bannon is losing power fast, it seems, and the amount of leaking and ass covering both
sides of this battle are doing is intense.
This does not bode well for the White House’s internal processes or functioning.
Trump’s administration is, of course, also under investigation, as is his campaign, his
associates, and there are already casualties.
It was weird, during the election, to watch Russia helping Trump, and being helped by
Trump, and to have the media treat it all as a curious sideshow.
But that’s over now, and the fallout has already consumed National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn, probably Trump’s most dangerous and abnormal key aide.
Flynn, by the way, is now seeking an immunity deal from federal prosecutors and Congress
in exchange for his testimony.
Always a good sign.
One of the strangest pieces of Trump’s presidency is how much he has backpedaled on the major
promises of his campaign.
Everything that set him apart, that made him a populist, he’s just throwing it away.
Remember when he was going to cover everybody with health care?
Trump: “Everybody’s gotta be covered.
This is an un-Republican thing for me to say.
Universal health care?
I am going to take care of everybody.”
Yeah his bill didn’t do that.
Remember when he was going to brand China a currency manipulator?
He had been talking about that for years.
Trump: “They are the single biggest currency manipulator that’s ever been on this planet.”
And then he became president and haha, just kidding.
Remember when he was going to avoid fights like Syria, he criticized Obama for drawing
the red line in the first place?
“President Obama, do not attack Syria.
There is no upside and tremendous downside.
Save your powder for another (and more important) day!”
-We are just getting in some video of US strikes in Syria.
Turns out he just hadn’t thought it through.
In some cases, these flip-flops represent Trump coming to a more grounded position,
and great that’s fine.
But the fact that he has no coherent philosophy of governance, and his ideas are so weakly
held, that they’re this easily changed — that’s bad, that’s evidence of how unpredictable
and volatile his presidency is.
How little the president himself knows.
And that can lead to real disaster.
The other problem Trump is facing is he has no magic fix for the GOP’s internal tensions.
It is striking how taken aback he was by the resentments and factionalism splitting House
Republicans during the health care debate.
TRUMP: “I like Speaker Ryan; he worked very, very hard.
A lot of different groups, he’s got a lot of factions, and there’s been a long history
of liking and disliking even within the Republican Party, long before I got here."
What you just heard Trump say there is a sign of how weakened he is.
His White House is even worrying they won’t be able to prevent a government shutdown even
though their party holds complete control of Congress.
Look, take a step back here.
Imagine I’d had told you a few months ago that America would soon elect an unpopular,
undisciplined, inexperienced, scandal-plagued reality television star to the presidency,
and that he would staff his White House with warring advisers who had never worked in government
and who would spend their time trying to undercut each other.
You probably would have predicted a presidency that looks very much like the one we have
now.
Which isn’t to say Trump hasn’t accomplished anything, much less that he won’t.
Neil Gorsuch got confirmed to the Supreme Court, for instance, and a number of Trump’s
executive orders are consequential — his recent climate change directives in particular.
And if nothing else, Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from taking office and turning the
Supreme Court Democratic for the first time in a generation.
As one Republican Hill staffer said to me, “If we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war,
a lot of us will count this as a win."
And look, fair enough, but what we’re learning, day by day, is there’s no magic to Trump.
When he does things people hate, he becomes unpopular.
When he backs bad legislation and bad processes —the bills fail.
Trump has not found a shortcut for American politics.
To succeed at a hard job, he has to work hard in ways and at tasks that he has, until now,
shown little aptitude for and less interest in.
Trump himself may never be a normal president, but the system he leads remains more normal
than many expected.
You can imagine scenarios where that changes — a terrorist attack, for instance — but
the fact remains that so far, incompetence, not autocracy, has defined the Trump administration.
He has achieved much less than his predecessors at this point in their terms, and he has done
so at great cost to his own popularity.
It is possible, of course, Trump will yet recover.
But it is also possible he’ll enter a failure loop, where his unpopularity and his scandals
and his failed initiatives and his poor management lead to more public anger and more aggressive
congressional investigation and more failed initiatives and more fracturing and infighting
among his staff.
The 2018 elections are a long way away, but Donald Trump is off to a very bad start.