A Sober Assessment of Trump’s First 100 Days

The most commonplace assessments provided by professional journalists are concluding that the President either did not or has not yet delivered on campaign promises he made about what he would accomplish in his first 100 days. These generally, as in this AP story, include lists of the specific promises compared to what has actually happened. This is what professional journalists do. Some conclude he has delivered, but on promises to undermine democracy.

The President’s assessment (covered here by AP), like any president, starts with lowering expectations and concludes with ‘it’s a false standard’ and ‘I don’t think anybody has done what we have been able to do in 100 days…my administration has brought profound change to Washington.’

Neither assessment strikes me as sober. Journalists, focusing on the facts, miss the larger meaning of the word ‘accomplishments,’ particularly when associated with the President of the United States. The President, trying to assert his preferred label for that larger meaning, misses engaging with the facts on the ground needed to determine the validity of his claim. 

President Trump has been neither the monumental failure nor the threat to national security and world peace that many fears. He has also been unable to deliver on specific campaign promises.

But perhaps more importantly he has also demonstrated a capacity to learn just how ‘complicated’ governance can be. 100 days in he now says NAFTA is okay, the Fed is okay, China is okay, Putin is a problem, intervention in Syria is now a good thing, North Korea must be dealt with carefully, with no mention of Mexico paying for a wall that is not in the budget and continuing the Obama administration’s focus on deporting only illegal immigrants who have committed a serious crime.

As I see it, this is the best news at the 100 day mark.

We are not engaged in a nuclear exchange with North Korea or a trade war with China. We have not seen tens of millions of Americans lose their health care. These all appeared within the realm of the possible on day one.

So, I am thankful that our president has more than once commented candidly on just how ‘complicated’ it is to govern.

And I hope this message sinks in even more deeply for the president and for the rest of the country: all the BS about ‘government is always the problem’ is just that. As even this president has learned—governance requires weighing complicated trade-offs and looks nothing like the simplistic rhetoric that drives presidential campaigns.

We all need to internalize this insight: what we do when we govern matters and is not easy.

Now we can stop pretending that the solutions are ‘so obvious’ if only those idiots (on the other side of the aisle) would give way to a ‘real leader’ willing to cut through the nonsense and just do it. The masquerade where those anti-democratic sound-bites made sense has now been revealed as a fraud and this is the primary lesson of President Trump’s first 100 days.

In this very narrow (and low bar) sense, his first 100 days has been much more successful than I had anticipated. And I am hoping for more of the same moving forward.