U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet reacting to public conversations about his first 100 days in office was symbolic: it had his customary disparagement of a well-worn tradition, of assessing the President’s early progress, and it was sandwiched between two tweets on U.S. foreign policy that reflected, respectively, his failing game of cat-and-mouse with a belligerent, nuclear-armed North Korea and his not-so-subtle apparent cheer for Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in the French presidential election.
After multiple polls across the U.S. gave Mr. Trump the lowest marks in recent history for any President’s first-100-days performance, the milestone he will achieve on April 29, he tweeted, “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!”
Mr. Trump may have a cause for complaint, particularly given that a recent CNN/ORC poll found that 44% respondents said that they approve of his handling of the presidency, while 54% disapproved, and that nearly two-thirds of Americans give him poor or middling marks in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, including a plurality who feel that he is off to a “poor start.”
The surprise result from among these 100-day assessments, however, would have to be the poll by Fox News, the favourite news channel of American conservatives, which found that only 36% of respondents would vote to re-elect Mr. Trump after his first 100 days, compared to a 52% figure for former U.S. President Barack Obama.
At what cost?
Returning to the matter of Mr. Trump’s tweet on this subject, it is true that the American president successfully pushed through the nomination of Neil Gorsuch as his nominee to fill the sole vacant spot on the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby firmly tilting the apex judiciary body toward the conservative side.
Yet that accomplishment was made relatively easy because the U.S. Congress, which is responsible for confirmation hearings, was happy to play along with Mr. Trump’s plan so long as he offered them a generous dollop of quid pro quo.
As it turned out Mr. Trump did exactly that — with unexpected consequences — when he agreed to push forward with the plan to repeal and replace “Obamacare”, as per proposals backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan.
A significant swathe of Americans must have welcomed the news that the plan to rescind the Affordable Care Act, the landmark healthcare reform which brought insurance coverage to millions of poorer individuals and broke the stranglehold restrictions of deep-pocketed insurance companies on ordinary citizens, could not survive a vote in Congress, in part because it lacked support even from Republicans.
Defending plans
With the clock ticking down the final hours to the 100-day mark, the 45th U.S. president has been taking to Twitter to defend his intention to #BuildTheWall along the Mexican border, and attacking the Ninth Circuit court for repeatedly knocking down his attempts to curtail sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants or immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries.
Between these setbacks and foreign policy flip-flopping on China, Russia, Iran, NATO, and Syria among others, if 100 days could be this embattled, what will 365 days, or 1,460 days bring?
