Josh Marshall: Thinking About Trumps 100 Day Fail

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-about-trumps-100-day-fail

Thinking About Trump’s 100 Day Fail

By Josh Marshall
Published April 29, 2017 11:32 am


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Despite the right-wing mythology that has grown up since, claiming that President Obama pushed legislation through on party line votes and didn’t reach out to Republicans to craft bipartisan legislation, really quite the opposite was the case. Indeed, one of the best critiques of the ACA legislative process is that Obama and the Democrats spent much of 2009 waiting on working groups (“gangs”) of Senate Republicans and Democrats trying to find some point of bipartisan compromise. The final bill was watered down significantly in that process. None of the Republicans voted for the bill anyway.

There’s an interesting debate to be had over whether the Republicans were operating in bad faith all along or whether right-wing opposition simply hardened over the course of the discussions. The real point is that big legislation is hard in the American system. The health care legislative process was slightly delayed by emergency economic crisis legislation in early 2009. But it got started early, took a long time and – this is the critical part – only barely ended up getting passed.

That last part is key. The law only barely got passed because the President and the Democrats were running up against all the constraints that make it important to get laws passed early. Partisan opposition was hardening. The President’s early-term popularity was slackening. Elections were on the horizon.

A central challenge for President Trump was always that he started his presidency distinctly unpopular. He was a plurality rather than a majority President. And he began his presidency with deep and entrenched opposition. On the other hand, he had congressional majorities which should have given him or at least his party a relatively free hand. That didn’t happen. A big problem was that Trump didn’t have any legislation or even a plan of governance ready. He barely even had a government at all in the sense that most key jobs were left (and remain) unfilled. He proceeded to fritter away his first months in office with a mix of scandal, disorganization and legislative ineptitude.

When we consider the 100 day marker, it is not so much that Trump has accomplished virtually nothing of substance. It is that nothing of substance is really underway either. That’s the key thing.

On Monday, President Trump’s 102 day in office, he will begin from more or less a cold start, as though the first three months hadn’t happened. The difference is that he’ll face a calendar that is far less friendly to legislation and he’ll have squandered whatever degree of good will, momentum or confidence he had from congressional Republicans in his ability to be an effective President.