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Thread: Trump has struggled in his first 100 days. But JUSTIN WEBB is optimistic

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    Default Trump has struggled in his first 100 days. But JUSTIN WEBB is optimistic

    Trump has struggled to deliver on a string of promises in his first 100 days. But JUSTIN WEBB finds reasons for optimism...

    Donald Trump has some regrets. ‘I like to drive. I can’t drive any more,’ he told the Reuters news agency this week. The presidency, he said, had been a harder job than he had realised and his tone became regretful, even wistful: ‘I loved my former life...’
    And yet with each passing week, his bitter opponents (of whom there are many) are having to come to terms with the fact that Mr Trump, although he may have regrets about taking the damned job, is revelling in it. His madcap, jumping-jack-flash of a presidency is going from . . . well, not exactly strength to strength — that would be stretching reality — but it’s still going somewhere, and in some respects it is going rather well.

    Of course, as with any president, the reality of trying to deliver on noisy campaign promises soon becomes apparent when you arrive in the Oval Office.
    The most famous, perhaps, was Trump’s promise to build a wall along the entire length of the border with Mexico. For that reason, in political terms it feels like a must-do project if he is to retain credibility among those who voted for him. Yet in reality the project is almost overwhelmingly difficult to undertake.
    When I visited Texas recently, I went to the Big Bend area — a million square acres of nothing much except dust and brush around the tiny border town of Presidio. Here you see the challenge facing Trump and his builders.

    This is no Manhattan skyscraper project of the kind with which he is associated. This is moonscape. Moonscape and river and mountain and desert. For 2,000 miles. There are already fences in places. But some of this terrain is simply wildly inhospitable, and the idea of building a wall feels barmy. The locals point out that during violent storms the river floods, so the wall will have to have gaps for the water to flow. A wall with holes. It may well be that Congress will refuse the money to build it, though Trump has rather vaguely insisted the Mexicans themselves will have to pay for it. So, as he marks 100 days of his presidency today, this totem of Trumpism still hangs there as a promise, but nothing more.



    The presidency, he said, had been a harder job than he had realised and his tone became regretful, even wistful: ‘I loved my former life...’

    His healthcare reforms to the last administration’s so-called ‘Obamacare’ insurance programme have also completely failed to lift off and had to be abandoned. That is a Trump promise very much stuck in the mud. He is also trying to get a huge tax cut out of the blocks at the moment, but with no certainty of success. The same is true of the spending he promised on better roads, airports and wifi networks. Talk has not been matched by action.

    If you have been to America recently, you will have noticed that much of the place is — to use the word Trump himself used in his inaugural speech — ‘carnage’. It’s broken. Rusted. Sad.

    It is no coincidence that the customer service of the American airlines — which has been in the news of late — is so bad. Even when you don’t get hauled off an overbooked flight by violent security staff, the experience of flying in America is uniformly miserable and everyone hates it.
    On the ground, the airports are elderly and creaking. Links between airports and cities are solid with traffic. Public transport is slow and inconvenient: bridges are literally falling down, eaten away by the elements and ignored by generations of feckless local politicians. It feels old-fashioned. Americans who visit Singapore or Dubai come back chastened.

    So what became of the Trump promise to fix the infrastructure? Well, nothing much. You see, the Trump takeover of the Republican party was fine for last year’s presidential election, but it was never going to be a complete overthrow. The Republicans who call the shots in Congress care deeply about a little thing called the national debt. Actually: it’s a very big thing; $19 trillion and rising. Trump — the property tycoon, the wheeler-dealer, the flirter with bankruptcy — does not, in his heart of hearts, give a jot. But they do, which is why they are not willing to sanction untrammelled spending. He might get his tax cut, but it will need to be balanced by less spending, and that is not Trumpism. As the President is discovering the hard way, under the U.S. system the most powerful man in the world can spend nothing and raise nothing without Congress letting him.





    R

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    I think this is a very fair summary of Trump's 100 days in power.

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    shapiro has some good analysis. When the promise involved executive powers trump was able to deliver on like 70-80% of it. When the promise involved congress it was 0.
    is on twitter @realtsuke

    https://tsukesthoughts.wordpress.com/

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