The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency will set the tone for the next four to eight years. Described by House Speaker Paul Ryan as a “man of action,” Trump plans to hit the ground running with an ambitious reset of American trade policy and sweeping government reforms.
In addition to the new president’s own policy preferences, an entire Cabinet must be confirmed. Trump has to fill a Supreme Court seat that Senate Republicans left vacant until one of their own was in the White House. And he has to hire another 4,000 people for executive branch jobs.
“It holds a lot of symbolic meaning,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said of the first 100 days. “This is the report card to show progress.”
Not everyone is eager to cooperate. Progressive filmmaker Michael Moore has called for “100 days of resistance” to Trump. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a column titled “12 ways to disrupt Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president.” Massive protests have been planned for his inauguration this Friday.
They are opposed to much of Trump’s platform. They fear or claim to fear he is racially biased. They worry that he will not be transparent and that his failure to release his tax returns is a sign of how he will run the government.
“It feels like we are setting up for more of a dictatorship than a democratically elected president,” said Democratic strategist Bud Jackson. “That’s how it feels to many Democrats.”
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That judgment or assumption about what a Trump presidency will be makes many Democrats passionate to oppose Trump from Day One. “We need to do everything we possibly can to slow down his roll and hope at the end of four years to get a Democrat in the White House,” Jackson said.
O’Connell said, “Democrats want Trump to be slimed early and often out of the gate.”
Republicans are more hopeful, but many of them also have serious questions. When Trump said in October that he would push for congressional term limits during his first 100 days in office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it wouldn’t be on his agenda.
Some leading Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about Trump’s infrastructure plan. Details are sparse, but talk of a $1 trillion price tag makes fiscal conservatives queasy. The party fought President Obama’s $1 trillion stimulus eight years ago.
Not coincidentally, infrastructure is one area where Democrats have offered to work with Trump. He has promised to “build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways of tomorrow.” His dilemma is that the more tax credits and private financing is involved, the more Democrats will balk; the more public spending is in the plan, the more skeptical Republicans will be.
Some liberals are already attacking the infrastructure plan as a bid to privatize roads and other projects across the country. But Rust Belt Democrats representing areas Trump won in the election might have an incentive to agree with whatever he proposes, especially if they get a place at the table in the planning phase. Rank-and-file Republicans from deep red districts might also swallow their ideological misgivings because Trump is popular with their constituents.
“I think a lot of the infrastructure plan is going to come from [Vice President Mike] Pence sitting with McConnell and saying this is where Trump is, this is where we’re comfortable going,” O’Connell said.
On the Democratic side, several senators are up for re-election in 2018 from states Trump won handily. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has already signaled his willingness to reach across the aisle and work with the new president. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., will also get a lot of attention from the administration.
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Trump’s agenda can be split into roughly two pieces: policies that would be advocated by virtually any mainstream Republican president and those that are unique to Trump. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he declared when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination. He doesn’t always fit neatly into the conventional left-right political spectrum.
On tax reform and deregulation, Trump looks like the rest of the Republican Party. He may be especially interested in rolling back environmental regulations that hurt job growth in the states he won, but that’s in line with many conservative Republicans, who would like to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency. For every new regulation imposed, Trump wants two existing regulations scrapped.
Many of his proposals to “drain the swamp” are longtime conservative favorites. Term limits were part of the Republicans’ 1994 Contract with America. The Reagan administration also reduced the federal workforce through attrition. Trump’s proposed lobbying bans on people who work in his White House are stricter than some that have been floated in the past, but could find support from both the limited-government right and the good-government left.
Trump has common ground with Republicans on Obamacare: he wants to repeal it. But the details are murky. There is no agreement on a Republican plan to replace the controversial healthcare law, though Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is the author of one major alternative.
Republicans also disagree on the timing of repeal and replace as well as some on the process that will be used to get it done. GOP leaders appeared to be coalescing around a “repeal and delay” strategy of wiping the law off the books quickly but delaying the effective date to buy time to deal with the millions who have gained coverage under it.
But Trump has said he wants no gap between repeal and the reforms that will replace it. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., another advocate of simultaneous repeal and replace, said Trump reiterated this position in a conversation they had. Trump has shown he can swing some GOP votes in Congress by issuing edicts on Twitter.
These tactical differences are important, but at least on Obamacare, Trump and congressional Republicans share the same goal. Where Trumpism begins to look different from traditional conservative orthodoxy is on the question of what role government should play in ensuring positive economic outcomes for workers. That’s at the heart of Trump’s disagreements with fellow Republicans on infrastructure and trade and what motivates his campaigns to shame businesses that are moving jobs overseas.
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While Republicans in Congress might be wary of government intervention in the free market, Trump has no such ideological compunctions. He has pledged to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and formally announce his intention to re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement on his first day in office.
“I will direct my secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator,” Trump vowed in his 100-day plan. “I will direct the secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately.”
Trump agrees with fiscal conservatives that taxes and regulations can kill jobs. But he believes that the government can take a much more proactive role in both creating new jobs and keeping existing ones from being offshored.
Congressional Republicans have built up a backlog of legislation they have been waiting for a president to sign rather than veto. They are hoping they now have one in Trump. Ryan ran in 2016 on a separate conservative platform he called a “Better Way.”
How the two get along will go a long way to determining the success of this project in a unified Republican government.
“There were times during the campaign when it was uncomfortable between Trump and Ryan and the rest of the Republican establishment,” Jackson said. “Could that happen again? What else is he going to do that makes these Republicans uncomfortable? There is the potential for him to become an island unto himself.”
Some Trump supporters worry that he will spend too much political capital on Ryan’s agenda, running out of time and leverage for enacting his own distinctive policies. “E-verify and wall are things you need to do in the first 100 days,” wrote veteran blogger Mickey Kaus, in reference to two big pieces of Trump’s immigration platform. “Not sure ‘tax reform’ is.”
“A Ryan-Pence-McConnell presidency isn’t really what people in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan voted for,” said one pro-Trump activist. Not delivering for the working class would reinforce the Democrats’ case against Trump.
“This is a government of the uber-rich and it is average working people who are going to get left behind,” Jackson said. “They don’t really care about working families, they care more about playing politics and being around a celebrity.”
One possibility that some Trump supporters would especially like to avoid is that President Trump signs Medicare reforms that prove unpopular with senior citizens, an Obamacare repeal that is disruptive to the coverage of many people who voted Republican in the presidential election, or tax reforms that make Trump look like a conventional Republican without any progress on the border wall, tougher immigration enforcement or re-doing trade deals.
“He needs to find that balance between doing things that are uniquely Trump and the broader Republican agenda,” said O’Connell, adding that fulfilling some items on the conservative wish list will make it easier for him to bring Republicans along on his own priorities. “Get a Supreme Court nominee up there as quickly as possible.”
Nominating a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia is likely to be easy to do in a 100-day timeframe, even if the Democrats are certain to wage a protracted confirmation fight. Filling other vacancies on the federal judiciary with proven conservatives will go a long way to convincing Republicans to trust Trump’s judgment in other areas and possibly defer to him on his less conventionally conservative action items.
Evangelicals, in particular, are “looking for a friendly Supreme Court appointment,” said Matthew Wilson, associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. “That’s probably the single most important thing, a justice who will be supportive to pro-life and religious issues.”
Then there is the matter of Trump’s temperament and Twitter account. He will be the first real social media president, in the sense of posting all his content himself. He has continued to post his opinions about non-political matters and to feud with critics. As president, his words will mean even more.
“We were told to keep waiting for the ‘other Trump,’ ” said a Democratic consultant. “He never came.”
Trump’s unpredictability has often been an asset, as is his ability to keep himself in the center of the national conversation. But Democrats are hopeful that they can use any erratic behavior on the part of the president against him.
“Be prepared to react to what Trump gives us,” Jackson said. “We need to be able to adapt and adjust.”
Trump will also have to adapt to working through a governing process that is very different from the corporate boardroom and dealing with a wide variety of issues that arise without warning. Once in office, he will be judged by what he can accomplish rather than what he promises or what his intentions are.
The clock on keeping those promises is about to start ticking.
