How's Donald Trump doing? To answer this question, senior editor Peter Kadzis and columnist David Bernstein talk it out.
KADZIS: There is a delicious — if understandable — hypocrisy in evaluating Donald J. Trump's first 100 days as president. The 100-day reference, of course, is to Franklin D. Roosevelt, his New Deal, and the historic 78 bills passed and signed into law during the dark days of the Great Depression. So tense was the public then, so on edge were officials, that machine guns were mounted on the Capitol to guard against a riot erupting as FDR took the oath of office. The situation today may not be good, but it's nothing like 1933. Ever since Roosevelt, taking a snapshot of each new president's early progress has been a rite of passage. It's a painful exercise, but something to be borne with fortitude.
No one is going to accuse President Trump of being stoic. He's the product of a good, old-fashioned dysfunctional family: an immigrant mother who set a high moral tone and an overbearing father whose standards for success left little room for self reflection. The result: a narcissistic bully who doesn't cotton to being judged. The failure — to date — of Trump's immigration and refugee ban; of repealing and replacing Obamacare, of granting the one percent another tax break gives the media multiple chances to rub salt in DJT’s wounds. There was, it is true, the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, but Gorsuch sprang fully formed from the Republican’s binder full of Ivy League conservatives. Any GOP president could have picked him. It's also true that the missile attack on Syria and the big bomb dropped on ISIS in Afghanistan left the press and much of the public feeling manly again. My verdict: it could have been worse. Mass incarcerations have failed to materialize, at least for citizens. And worries about nuclear incineration are premature. No cause for concern until South Korea starts evacuating its cities.
BERNSTEIN: I would make one amendment to your analysis: Trump doesn't cotton to being judged poorly. He would love to bask in the glow of 100-day reviews if they were positive. He knows they won't be, and he's pouting about it. He's going to hold a rally Saturday — day 100 — to counter-program those negative reviews with his own version. He tried to cram a whirlwind of action into the final week leading up to the 100th day, partly to try to show accomplishment, but also to provide obstructionist scapegoats on whom to blame the lack of progress. He wants to be able to say, “I would have built the beautiful wall and totally fixed health care if not for those weasels in Congress! I would have rid the homeland of foreign evildoers if not for those activist judges!”
The truth is, though, that you're absolutely right: he needs to stop drawing attention to the machinery of governing, which he's been miserably bad at so far, and place the focus on the fact that things are actually going pretty well in America right now. Polls show that the country still can't shake the "wrong track" feeling it's been mired in since the start of the big recession, even though unemployment is low, wages are starting to rise, stocks are soaring, few American soldiers are dying in combat, and domestic terrorism is minimal. America could use a cheerleader, for the country, not for the president. Of course, the only thing Trump is capable of cheerleading for is himself.
KADZIS: Thanks to social media, many of us are in love with ourselves. In this, Trump is representative. Unlike Roosevelt who played politics as an exercise in seeking the most good for the most people, Trump views his life and the presidency as a zero sum game. Only if others loose can Trump win. This explains his vampire-like obsession with his predecessor. It’s not sufficient for Trump’s FCC to kill net neutrality. It must kill Barack Obama’s net neutrality. There are several administrative actions that are clear Republican accomplishments — dissolving climate change protections, revoking fair play and safe worker orders and advancing construction of the Keystone pipeline. These are all negative from a Democratic point of view, but marzipan for any big-business Republican. This is Trump’s style overshadowing his actions, of the president tripping himself up. Style, of course, is the ultimate morality of the mind.
BERNSTEIN: Trump was thoroughly unprepared and ill-equipped to be president, but he also faces unusual challenges to making the types of tangible, points-on-the-board accomplishments the media looks for in a "first 100 days" review. He was explicitly elected as an outsider, a disrupter, to "blow up the system." Well, that's led to a White House lacking in the insider expertise needed to get things done within the system. He heads a party that has been co-opted by the movement-conservative marketplace, which punishes all rational policy discourse. Remember, House Republicans just ran their speaker out of town 18 months ago and struggled to find a replacement. Trump ran on a populist, nativist platform at direct odds with the corporatist, globalist demands of his party's leaders and benefactors. Plus, I don't know that there has ever been a newly elected President so personally toxic within his own party's governing class that he couldn't find people willing to come work for the administration. Combine all those factors with Trump's personal flaws and his lack of foundational knowledge or beliefs on the issues, and it's not much of a recipe for quick success.
KADZIS: I take your point. But now it’s my turn to draw a distinction. The Trump presidency is a riddle of contradictions. The agency of Trump’s power, the institution that has enabled him, is the Republican Party. He sought and won the Republican nomination. Yet Trump and the party have yet to reconcile themselves to the reality that he did so by actively rejecting Republicanism as it exists today and as manifest by its establishment. Candidate Obama may have been an outsider, but nominee Obama had few problems reconciling with the Democratic elite. President Obama may not have been a back slapper, but in office there was no doubt he was a Democrat. Washington Republicans still don’t know what to make of Trump, for the reasons you site. Trump himself is little more than a force field of improvisation. It’s difficult to compromise with a shape shifter because today’s Trump is not tomorrow’s. Attract the ultramontane Freedom Caucus and alienate the moderate Tuesday Group. And vice versa. The swing voters who gave Trump his Electoral College majority were Democrats who may not like diversity politics, but nevertheless are addicted to big government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Trump’s style may be ADHD, but his coalition is schizophrenic. The cultural contradictions of Trumpism almost preclude any achievement that isn’t, well, accidental. If I’m right, what’s that suggest for the next 100 days?
BERNSTEIN: Most likely, Trump and Congressional Republicans will continue to struggle with significant policy change. This week's flailing attempt to change the 100-day narrative will only exacerbate that: the healthcare 2.0 push, premature tax cut announcement, and budget-deal meddling only made life harder for Republicans on the Hill. But to look forward, I'll go back to what I wrote for you before Trump's inauguration: setting aside policy, the big questions about the Trump administration concern corruption, incompetence and discrimination. Perhaps the most important takeaway at the 100-day mark is that none of those three concerns have been eased — if anything, they have grown. If Trump can't start to put those to rest in the next 100 days, or the next, it only makes everything he wants to do harder and harder.
KADZIS: If Trump were operating in the Dorchester of my youth, the rap on him would be that he’d screw up a two-car funeral. Two examples: A) In the admirable course of trying to intimidate the North Koreans, the Trump Administration managed to “loose” for a couple days an aircraft carrier it had dispatched to the region. B) The 139th White House Easter Egg Roll: Attendance at this iconic event was down by 15,000 this year. Why? The Trumpsters were late in organizing invitations. Competence is clearly not a strong point. As for corruption, Russiagate is — at a minimum — a very disturbing footnote. Whether it rises to the level of Richard Nixon’s Watergate or Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra remains to be seen. The fact that the parameters of Russiagate keep expanding is not good news for the president. And I’m not even dipping my toe into the swamp represented by various Trump and Kushner family businesses. Discrimination, I’m afraid, is a given. Little is unforgivable in American political life. But Trump’s birtherism is a notable exception. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is as fine a monument to the old Confederacy as can be found south of the Mason-Dixon Line. So, David, you were — and are — on the money. Your witness.
BERNSTEIN: The last thought from me is that Trump has exhibited a somewhat surprising ability to adapt and change. He'll never admit he was wrong on anything, of course, but he saw that he was wrong on Mike Flynn, China, Assad, NATO, and Janet Yellin, and changed course on all of them. That gives me hope that 100 days from now, some of the sources of incompetence will no longer be working in the White House.
KADZIS: I never suspected you of being an optimist.
