President Trump’s first full month in office coincided with Black History Month. And on the face of it, February was a predictably Trumpian mess: His administration not only blundered from its February 1st listening session to last week’s awkward statements and bungled photo-ops. What began with verb-tense errors and shameful vagueness, revealing Frederick Douglass an albeit “impressive” unknown to the president, ended with ill-chosen words from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and an Oval Office group photo that spawned its own, unrelated mini-scandal.

But maybe it’s just as well. Because, underneath an appearance of chaos, Team Trump and the Republican Congress made public commitments to an impressive and too-often forgotten segment of the African-American community. The administration and Republican lawmakers have already advanced more significant promises than their predecessors ventured—and it’s hard to imagine they did it all for the “optics,” because the optics really were that bad.