Donald Trump is new to this. But not as new as he was nearly 100 days ago.
Inexperience and novelty have been defining characteristics of President Trump’s first three months in office, both for better and for worse. He has made rookie mistakes and proven malleable, even credulous to bad arguments. But, to good effect, his flexibility has dragged him away from some bad ideas, and there are signs that his could be a sharply pragmatic administration.
“Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated,” Trump declared, more than a little absurdly, in late February, as the House prepared to take up the ill-fated American Health Care Act. The president was stating what everyone apparently except he had long understood. Trump then pushed his party to rush the bill through Congress. He issued a transparent and counterproductive bluff, telling reluctant Republicans that this bill was his final offer.
Only someone unacquainted with policymaking would think repealing and replacing Obamacare would be simple, just as only a president who had never followed the post-Tea Party GOP would think he could strong-arm the House Freedom Caucus, which called his bluff and doomed his first go-round.
The inexperience of Trump and his White House has popped up again and again in these first 100 days. “After listening for 10 minutes,” Trump said of his North Korea conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, “I realized it’s not so easy.”
Trump’s willingness to learn is a virtue, and he has often moved away from error. Dubbing China a currency manipulator, as he promised on the campaign, was neither factually accurate nor economically productive. Xi seems to have talked him out of that. On NATO, as well, Trump has been persuaded.
But in Washington, malleability can be a weakness, especially when the lobbyists close in like jackals. We’ve already seen Trump drop his free-market and populist position on Export-Import Bank, and his populist supporters worry where he will go on trade and low-skilled guest workers.
Years in Washington allow a defiant politician to develop antibodies and immunities to special-interest pleading and the allure of mainstream media adoration. Trump doesn’t have experience being lied to by lobbyists, nor perhaps the skills to distinguish their sophistry from real insight.
Nevertheless, Trump has also shown that his malleability and his predisposition to make a deal can also yield dividends in government. After spending the campaign critiquing his predecessors’ military adventurism, Trump didn’t hesitate to strike Syria when President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his people. Yet at the same time, he didn’t get carried away and gun for regime change. Instead, he has shown both firmness and restraint toward Syria.
Trump’s Syria policy, especially since his foreign policy operation is understaffed, has so far been the most positive surprise of this administration.
His single best action in his first 100 days wasn’t a surprise and it wasn’t a flip either. It was his appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. In this, Trump delivered on an election promise to nominate a justice “in the mold of” the late Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch isn’t merely conservative; he’s eloquent, intelligent, careful, principled and young. With this appointment, Trump has, for a generation, made the rule of law more secure.
His executive actions have also been good. His Justice Department has promised to impose stricter penalties on crimes related to illegal immigration, and to end the “catch-and-release” policies that have created the havoc of recent decades. Trump has also reversed Obama’s special-interest overreaches on pipelines, subsidies for Planned Parenthood, transgender bathrooms and much else. He has set in motion a campaign to roll back overregulation.
Trump’s newness to politics may also explain the strangest aspect of the transition and his first 100 days, which has been on Russia. Perhaps overly influenced by Paul Manafort, a highly paid agent for Russian interests, Trump seemed repeatedly to be too cozy with President Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. He refused to criticize Putin’s murders, his election meddling, and all his aggressive contraventions of law and propriety. Trump has, though, destroyed the idea that he would be a puppet of Putin, not least by firing 59 cruise missiles into that theory in his punitive strike on Syria.
Trump still, however, threatens his own accomplishments with a sloppiness that is probably another fruit of inexperience. His first executive order suspending immigration from terrorist-ridden countries was poorly drafted, rushed out without vetting, and never explained to the media and the public.
He has most gotten in his own way with tweets and comments unbecoming a president. He has stooped to attack reporters, made careless allegations of wiretapping, blustered and called names.
Of course, this was and is part of Trump’s appeal to “tell it like it is,” which really means he says what he thinks regardless of the norms of polite discourse. His inexperience was what voters were seeking.
Trump will need to learn many things quickly, and one hopes that these will include a greater measure of impulse control, how to navigate Congress — he has, as yet, no major legislative accomplishments — and generally a better grasp of how the world works.
He’s faced a steep learning curve so far. He has climbed some of it. We hope he keeps conquering that challenging slope.
