First 100 days of President Trump: like a drunk stumbling down a highway
Full of sound and fury about tariffs, border walls, North Korea and travel bans, all of the leader of the free world’s bluster has thus far signified next to nothing
There’s been such a frenzy of activity by this preternaturally distractible US president that it seems hard to believe he has only been in office since late January. Trump has been a godsend to journalism. Newspaper subscriptions and online page views are up, and audiences are rushing back to cable news channels, all to see what Trump and his team will do next.
It’s a bit like seeing a drunk staggering blindly down a busy highway – you know something very bad is going to happen, but you can’t stop yourself from looking. Or maybe it’s more like watching a hostage video, which you know is heading towards a horrific ending, but you simply cannot turn away.
So much has transpired that after “No Drama Obama”, it seems that crazy is the new normal in the White House, just like orange is the new black.
Seriously, how much more of this news sensory overload can we take?
But there is some good news. For all of this peripatetic activity out of the Trump White House, most of it has been merely illusory, the appearance of motion – all sound and fury, and thankfully without much substance.
There is no Muslim travel ban, since the Trump executive order has been held up by successive federal courts.
There has been no repeal of the health-care plan known as “Obamacare” because the Republican Congress, once in power, suddenly realised that “repeal and replace” worked well as a campaign slogan but not as a national health policy.
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There has been no US withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. Apparently Trump’s White House aides are at war with themselves over whether global warming is really a myth or a scientific reality, and science appears to be winning.
On foreign policy, there has been no ripping up of the Iran nuclear deal, no severing of the new diplomatic ties with Cuba, no downgrading of relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and no move of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And last we checked, the US military said it had no intention to bring back torture.
Asia, in particular, can breathe a bit easier, at least after these first 100 days of Trump.
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So what we are left with is a dichotomy. On the one hand, this is a presidency that looks frenetically unbalanced, zigzagging from one topic to the next, and from one crisis to another, depending on that morning’s pre-dawn Twitter outburst. But beneath the surface craziness, and particularly on foreign policy, there is a remarkable consistency developing that follows the broad pattern of past administrations. Reaffirm old alliances. Work with China. Honour longstanding treaties and international agreements. Tread cautiously when confronting adversaries.
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But that was back when Congress could actually pass big legislation. Now partisan gridlock has made the US legislature so dysfunctional that funding the government and keeping the lights turned on counts as a legislative achievement.
I used to bemoan the dysfunction. Now I see it as a useful check on an erratic, some would say unhinged, executive in the Oval Office. Maybe legislative paralysis is precisely what the Founders intended.
One hundred days is still early in an administration that might last for four, even eight years. There is still a lot of damage that can be done. But I’m less worried now than I was on election night last year. Dare I say it? President Trump – in actions if not in words, by accident as much as design – is actually starting to seem remarkably normal. ■
Professor Keith B. Richburg, a former Washington Post correspondent, is director of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre