The first 100 days don’t matter. For Trump, they matter even less.
The first 100 days don’t matter. For Trump, they matter even less.
We still don’t know what kind of president Donald Trump really wants to be, but we may be about to find out. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Brace yourself now for the deluge of predictable stories about Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride during these first 100 days in office: the erratic tweets and tirades, the confusing shifts in policy on health care and Russia and, underlying all of it, the intensifying rivalries between aides, family members and department chiefs.
Even in normal cases, the whole 100-day construct is pretty silly. Anyone who’s ever started a new job — even one that doesn’t involve overseeing the world’s most formidable bureaucracy and its most powerful arsenal — knows that three months is barely enough time to figure out where the good vending machines are.
Trump’s case, though, isn’t close to normal, seeing as he was the least prepared president to assume office in any of our lifetimes. I say this not because he didn’t have the skill set needed to govern (that’s debatable), but because he literally wasn’t prepared to win. He’d given about as much thought to governing before November as I have to piloting a hot-air balloon.
The reality, to paraphrase Lincoln, is that history will little note nor long remember anything about these blurry 100 days, and when we look back even a year from now, trying to remember exactly who did what in Trump’s first months will be like trying to name the Marlins’ opening day lineup from, well, ever.
We still don’t know what kind of president Trump really wants to be, but I’m betting we’re about to find out.
Consider for a moment how this presidency thing normally works. You’re supposed to spend several months campaigning with a team of longtime advisers and new additions from the top ranks of your party, while emissaries from your campaign begin planning for a smooth handover of power.
It’s unheard of, historically speaking, to wake up as the president-elect without having a pretty good idea of who your main appointees and advisers will be — a list usually gleaned from years in political life.
Then you’ve got a few months of transition time to fill out the ranks of senior management in the various agencies and cement your agenda for the legislative session. By the time you take over, it ought to feel as if the curtain is rising after a long season of rehearsals.
Trump’s journey was nothing like this, and that’s not really his fault, or at least not entirely. Because he ran as an upstart with no political experience, Trump couldn’t rely on the usual cadre of steady and loyal hands. And because no one expected him to win the general election, his campaign never attracted the kind of old-hand operatives like a James Baker or a John Podesta, who can steer you through the serpentine waterways of Washington with a blindfold on.
Trump’s televised transition was really more of a slow acclimation to his having won the job — for him and for the rest of us. Far from having methodically chosen his most senior aides for their intellectual depth and management skill, Trump, apparently in shock, seems to have looked around the room he was sitting in on election night and appointed whoever was standing closest.
“People seem to like you, Priebus — you’re my chief of staff, OK? Bannon and Kellyanne, give yourself some fancy titles and figure all this out. I’m going to bed.”
This is how Steve Bannon ended up on the National Security Council, and how Trump ended up hiring and then firing a national security adviser who was secretly lobbying for Turkey. There was no plan to speak of.
This is an administration that’s apparently struggling with the annual Easter egg roll. You can imagine what that means for trade policy.
And so you have to look at these first few months as really more of a delayed transition. Trump’s been figuring out what day-to-day governing looks like, and whose judgment he can actually trust, and how enormous the bureaucracy turns out to be. He’s had mere weeks to think through what most new presidents have spent a lifetime in politics considering, which is what he really wants to accomplish.
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