President Donald Trump lives for superlatives, he wants the biggest, the best, the greatest. So it’s no surprise he’s already fuming about uncomplimentary reviews of his first 100 days in office.
Trump is approaching the first symbolic milestone of his presidency on Saturday with a familiar mix of bluster and smokescreens, meant to disguise the reality that he has produced one of the least-prolific first 100 day debuts of any president in modern history.
“No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S. C.), media will kill!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday, despite playing up the significance of the first 100 days marker in the past.
The tweet was classic Trump — getting ahead of bad news by using his press critics as a foil while fogging the line between truth and falsehood to evade serious political harm.
Top Trump aides, meanwhile, reject any idea that the President is struggling.
“He is fulfilling his promises and doing it at breakneck speed,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, citing Trump’s moves to increase military spending and to exit the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact.
But Trump’s critics argue that not only has the President failed to muster a record of significant political achievement in his first 100 days, he has tarnished his office.
They say that with his claims that former President Barack Obama tapped his phones and that millions of illegal voters threw the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, he has devalued the currency of truth on which successful presidencies depend. They accuse him of insulting US allies and presiding over a White House characterized by feuds, leaks and indiscipline.
“It’s not me … 65% of the American public, maybe 60%, are saying he is doing a bad job, he has got to figure out something for his second 100 days because it hasn’t been very good so far,” said CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, on “CNN Tonight” Friday.
Trump is not the only new president to take issue with being judged so early in their term. Many other presidents have bemoaned comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt’s legislative frenzy in 1933 that set the 100-day bar.
And Trump is such a unique public figure that judging him by established political conventions has never been a reliable gauge of his future prospects.
So a more important question might be whether it actually matters that Trump had a rocky first 100 days. Does history suggest that a rough start leads to a poor presidency? Or can presidents learn and adjust and still build a successful administration?
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