Trump’s 100 days of thunder and lightning

“[T]here’s certain things about the institution of the presidency and the responsibility of the presidency that tend to moderate your views. And it’s just realistic to understand that things look a little bit different when you get in the White House than when you’re running for the White House,” Grassley said.

For all the sound and fury, however, many things look the same as they did when Trump took office. Obamacare is still the law of the land for the “foreseeable future,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan put it. The big, beautiful border wall is still an idea rather than a developing fact, and Mexico has yet to receive the bill. The North American Free Trade Agreement still stands. The contours of tax reform and the next spending fight remain uncertain.

There have been major questions about whether Trump can harmonize the populism and nationalism at the center of his campaign platform, represented in the White House by his senior strategist, Steve Bannon, and the softer, more centrist image pushed by senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and eldest daughter Ivanka Trump.

The same applies to Trump’s opposition, the mostly left-wing activists who style themselves self-aggrandizingly as “the Resistance.” They can point to stronger-than-usual Democratic performances in predominantly Republican congressional districts as a sign of growing electoral strength. But they have yet to win a race.

Senate Democrats failed to block any Trump Cabinet nominee. Labor secretary pick Andrew Puzder was withdrawn partly in response to bipartisan objections. And Democrats also lost their ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees during their abortive effort to derail the smooth confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

With a job approval rating of 42.4 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average, Trump’s supporters are dug in. So are his opponents.

Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court should pay dividends for conservatives for decades, and it fulfilled a key Trump campaign promise to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. (AP Photos)

In the face of all that, real questions are being asked about whether Trump can ensure his next 100 days are filled with more than just angry tweets about fake news, countered by marchers in “pussy hats.”

“I don’t think you can grade two months into the semester,” said Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel. “You’ve got to get the whole year done. I’m a mom, I wouldn’t want my kids being graded right now.”

Trump supporters are pointing to several accomplishments to make the case that the first 100 days haven’t been for naught. Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court should pay dividends for conservatives for decades, and it fulfilled a key campaign promise to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat with a jurist who is both accomplished and adheres to a similar judicial philosophy.

A flurry of executive orders and memoranda opened Trump’s presidency, 33 of them in all. He reinstated the “Mexico City” policy barring taxpayer funds to international family planning organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas. That policy has been imposed by every Republican president since Ronald Reagan and then revoked whenever the Democrats retake the White House.

Trump also greenlighted the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which had been blocked by President Obama. These projects divide the Democratic Party, with labor unions supporting them as a boon to job creation and environmentalists adamantly opposed on the grounds that they will be bad for the planet.

“The executive orders on the hiring freeze, the regulatory freeze, the ‘Mexico City’ policy, the folks on the Cabinet” were the biggest conservative achievements of the first 100 days, said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Additionally, Trump has signed four Congressional Review Acts overturning Obama regulations to go along with his executive orders and meetings with business leaders. The regulatory relief is his carrot for businesses while his threatened tariffs are the stick he is wielding against companies that move jobs overseas.

“We’ve had over 100 business and thought leaders visit the White House in the first 100 days. Just bringing those people in and listening to them has been transformational in its own right,” said special assistant to the president and director of strategic initiatives Chris Liddell.

A flurry of executive orders and memoranda opened Trump’s presidency, 33 of them in all.

Some of the executive orders were more distinctive to Trump. He’s asked for more federal scrutiny of international trade agreements and trade deficits, along with stepped up duty collections. The president ordered enhanced immigration enforcement, expanding the category of illegal immigrants whose deportation is a high priority, and strengthening the Border Patrol.

Trump’s 90-day travel and immigration ban from six (originally seven) Muslim-majority countries with active jihadists was the most controversial action of his first 100 days. The original order was rushed, and triggered protests and confusion at airports. The more measured, revised version is held up in court after lawsuits were filed to block its implementation.

Rocky rollouts have defined the early Trump administration and detracted from his successes, from the travel ban to the first attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare through the ill-fated American Health Care Act.

“I don’t think we had much of a full campaign effort,” said White House legislative affairs director Marc Short of the healthcare push. “Like for a major piece of legislation, I think you need to have outside groups that are aligned and putting pressure” on Congress.

The bill was panned by liberals, conservatives and centrists alike. Among congressional Republicans, both the conservative Freedom Caucus and the centrist Tuesday Group balked. Health insurers and doctors were not engaged early in the process and many of the organizations representing them opposed the bill.

A late April Quinnipiac poll found that only 29 percent of voters approved of Trump’s handling of healthcare while 65 percent disapproved. By a 32-point margin, respondents said he was doing a worse job on the issue than Obama did. Sixty percent now say Republicans should “move on” from repeal.

“I don’t think we really had done that sort of outreach and had them providing the right insight to constituents about the benefits of repealing Obamacare and what it is we were asking for,” Short said. “There probably wasn’t the coalition efforts that we need on major pieces of legislation. Collectively, whether that was us or the House, it was not done effectively. And that’s something that needs to be done better in the future to get those groups on board.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has provided occasional bipartisan support for Trump initiatives, hailing from a state the president won by nearly 42 points. But even he couldn’t go along with the Republican efforts on Obamacare.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has provided occasional bipartisan support for Trump initiatives, hailing from a state the president won by nearly 42 points.

“I spoke to him before this. I said please don’t go down that rathole,” Manchin said. “That’s a horrible, horrible situation. But he had to keep a political promise. I told the president, ‘I hope you won’t go down there. I would like to see you take on tax reform and infrastructure. Those are win-wins.'”

“Healthcare ended up the way I thought it would end up, and I was disappointed there,” the senator added. “But all you can do is be an honest broker and try to be helpful.”

Short said, “I think one of our challenges is that repealing Obamacare by necessity will be largely a partisan vote. We wish that weren’t the case but that’s reality.” He did, however, say there were some lessons learned.

“We didn’t have [Health and Human Services Secretary] Tom Price in the Cabinet until two days before the healthcare bill was pulled from the floor,” Short said. “Seema [Verma] wasn’t put in place [as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] until the night before. So one challenge for us was not really having a full team in place.”

“I think we learn every day. I mean, I know that sounds clichéd,” said White House press secretary Sean Spicer. “We’re constantly trying to put processes in place that make us run more efficient, more comprehensive and it’s, I think, it’s not just what a new organization does but, I think, hopefully, what any sustaining organization does. Where they look and they say, ‘you know, can we improve that process or that input to get a better process?'”

The healthcare fight has broader implications for Trump’s ability to work with Congress. He is a businessman who is used to making deals on things of monetary value and unilateral executive decisions, not dealing with a legislature or with people who have principled, philosophical positions. One of his challenges will be finding ways to prevent intraparty divisions from sinking tax reform and his pending infrastructure plan.

“The thing that we could have been better prepared for was to prepare the president for how steep the divisions are within the Republican conference,” Short said. “That caught us off guard. We know that there are different factions, but since 2010 Republicans have campaigned on the need to repeal and replace Obamacare … we thought a lot of those factions would be put aside for the benefit of the overall repeal effort.

“But it became clear that those factions were so intense that in some cases the policy changes we were making weren’t going to add too many votes here or there.”

The healthcare fight has broader implications for Trump’s ability to work with Congress.

Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill defend his approach. “I’ve had more direct and indirect communication [with Trump] than I had in eight years with President Obama,” Manchin said.

Grassley added, “Basically, he’s bent over backward and I don’t think that Congress has responded accordingly. He’s worked real hard and worked closely with Congress and I don’t think that Congress has responded to his outreach the way that they should have.”

Manchin said, “[Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer knows how things should work and he has the ability to make them work, but he’s getting pushed by a progressive base that’s pushing him farther away from trying to find any kind of reconciliation or any type of camaraderie. It used to be guilt by association, now it’s almost guilt by conversation in Washington. It’s just absolutely unheard of.”

Still, some things have improved. Trump’s contentious relationship with Ryan from the campaign is a thing of the past, and sources in both the White House and on Capitol Hill say the two speak regularly about the Republican agenda. Their differences in style, philosophy and temperament have not been an obstacle to working together.

“I don’t know that you need to have two ideologues or two pragmatists,” Short said. “I do think that the two of them have developed a good working relationship and so that’s a positive for other legislation in the years to come.”

Ryan described Trump as a “man of action,” a line repeated by many of his supporters. “I think in terms of what the president’s done even post-election, immediately he was engaging in keeping jobs in states like Indiana, talking to business leaders about investing in our country,” McDaniel said.

“He operates like a governor. He wants to jump in and try do something every day,” Manchin said. “He’s constantly looking over, wanting to get involved, making phone calls, trying to save jobs, create jobs, keep jobs from leaving. That’s what governors have done. You get so involved and you want to help your state. That’s what I’m seeing him do.”

“He’s very results-oriented. I think when you think about business, right, saying you had a good year … doesn’t really matter if you’re not manufacturing or producing more and your sales are up,” Spicer said. “Sometimes I think you can see so-and-so hellbent on driving an ideological agenda that they forget about the results that they’re trying to achieve.”

The White House downplayed the conflicts between top Trump advisers and expressed doubts about any major staff shake-ups.

Spicer downplayed the conflicts between top Trump advisers and expressed doubts about any major staff shake-ups. “I think the president’s very confident in the team,” he said. “I don’t see anything happening.”

Trump is closing out of first 100 days winning new converts on foreign policy while irritating longtime allies. Frequent critics such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have embraced his military intervention in Syria to punish President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and his more confrontational posture toward North Korea. But early supporters such as conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have become sharply critical.

“[Trump] had a very clear message, which is why he motivated people in the middle of the night to line up to go see him at rallies,” Ingraham said in a television interview. “I’m not sure getting rid of Bashar al-Assad was at the top of the list of the people in Pennsylvania.”

But the counterview was put by Grassley, who said, “He’s reasserted America’s leadership in the world community by sending signals like the anti-chemical warfare thing in Syria … detonation of the MOAB in Afghanistan; sending armadas to [North] Korea; working closely with and putting pressure on China to do more to stop North Korea’s nuclearization; and standing firm against Russia as far as their participation in Syria or their Ukraine occupation. All of these things Obama was timid on and Trump is showing he’s not, and I think that’s going to straighten our world leadership.”

But the foreign policy conflicts are part of a broader debate between some of Trump’s staunchest backers and more conventional Republicans about whether he should be following his “America First” agenda or pursuing a mainstream GOP platform. Trump’s populist supporters worry that he has spent too much political capital on issues such as Obamacare repeal and not enough on the border wall and immigration.

“What he was saying to the populists, which is, you know, ‘You’ve been lied to for years by politicians that they’re gonna secure the border and everyone else is just lying to you. … I’m gonna secure the border,'” said a senior White House official. “Sure, if there’s literally a mountain range in this part of the border, maybe we don’t need to build a wall right there. But the point is, the president’s unflappable, absolute commitment to securing the border. And that’s going to mean building a wall over large swaths of the border.”

The other major sticking point of the next 100 days is whether Trump can resolve the unfinished business of the first 100 while still moving on to the continuing resolution, next year’s federal budget, a jobs-creating infrastructure bill and overhauling the tax code. Trump’s team insists they will try.

“We’re still working on Obamacare repeal and replacement,” said a senior administration official. “Our initial goal was to try to get this done as quickly as possible. And I think there is a lot of consensus and desire on the Hill to do that as quickly as possible.”

“There are several things that we did promise, that we are doing,” Short said. “There’s no doubt that healthcare was a setback but at this point, we are hopeful that out of that process Republicans are inside the conference talking to each other in ways that they hadn’t been before. And that we’ll produce a better plan because of it.”

That is going to be the key for the Trump administration. The first 100 days is an arbitrary deadline, but the 2018 midterm elections are written in stone and looming.

“If they don’t win those elections,” said one Republican strategist, “they might never get anything done again no matter how long they are in office.”

Al Weaver contributed to this report