70 days in, Donald Trump’s presidency is

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Mar 29, 2017 at 4:09 PM 211

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70 days in, Donald Trump’s presidency is flailing

Trump’s campaign rewarded him for breaking the rules. His presidency has punished him for it.

Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Mar 29, 2017, 9:50am EDT

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3...y-flailing

Like many who covered Trump, I found it hard, after all this, to predict the likely path of his presidency. Perhaps he could defy every norm and succeed there too. But with every day that passes, Trump is looking more bound by the political system he promised to upend.

The outcomes we’re seeing look like what you’d expect from an inexperienced, unfocused president who’s more interested in tweeting out cable news commentary than learning about the government he runs and the policies he wants to change. Merely 10 weeks into his term, the processes, skills, and institutions Trump flouted as a candidate are breaking him as a president. Consider his record so far:

Health care, Trump’s top priority, crashed and burned. Trump didn’t understand the American Health Care Act nor the legislative maneuvering that would be required to pass it. He endorsed the most unpopular piece of legislation in memory and then declared defeat after only 17 days. In doing so, he made everything else on his agenda harder, because he showed he doesn't have the stomach for a long congressional fight or the ability to sell complex, challenging proposals to the public.

Trump is historically unpopular. Less than three months into his presidency, Trump is less popular than Barack Obama was at any point during his two terms. To underscore Trump’s dubious achievement here, he is more unpopular with unemployment at 4.7 percent than Obama was when unemployment was 10 percent! It took President George W. Bush a disastrous war to hit Trump’s current polling nadir. This, too, makes everything else Trump wants to achieve harder — vulnerable congressional Republicans have little political incentive to back a president this unpopular on a hard vote.

........

Trump isn’t normal, but the system around him is

If I had told you that America would soon elect an unpopular, undisciplined, inexperienced, scandal-plagued reality television star to the presidency, and that he would staff his White House with warring advisers who had never worked in government, you likely would have predicted a presidency that looks very much like the one we have now.

Which isn’t to say Trump hasn’t accomplished anything, much less that he won’t. I expect Gorsuch to be confirmed, for instance, and a number of Trump’s executive orders are consequential — like the climate change directives released this week.

And if nothing else, Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from taking office and turning the Supreme Court Democratic for the first time in a generation. As one Republican Hill staffer said to me, “if we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war, a lot of us will count this as a win."

But what we’re learning, day by day, is there’s no magic to Trump. When he does things people hate, he becomes unpopular. When he backs bad legislation and bad processes, the bills fail. When he doesn’t prioritize staffing his government, his government doesn’t get staffed. When he doesn’t choose aides who know how to manage a presidency, his presidency careens forward unmanaged. When he doesn’t spend time learning about the policies he backs, he’s unable to persuade the American people of their benefits. When he doesn’t build deep relationships with the legislators in his party, he proves unable to corral them.

Trump has not found a shortcut for American politics. To succeed at a hard job, he has to work hard in ways and at tasks that he has, thus far, shown little aptitude for or interest in.

Trump himself may never be a normal president, but the system he leads remains more normal than many expected. While it's easy to imagine scenarios where that ceases to be true — a terrorist attack, for instance — the fact remains that so far, incompetence, not autocracy or even ruthless efficacy, has defined the Trump administration.

He has achieved much less than his predecessors at this point in their presidencies, and he has done so at great cost to his own popularity. Trump is struggling with the same veto points and limitations that frustrate all presidents, but he is further held back by his own inexperience and undisciplined approach.

It is possible Trump will yet recover. But it is also possible he’ll enter a failure loop, where his unpopularity and his scandals and his failed initiatives and his poor management lead to more public anger and more aggressive congressional investigation and more failed initiatives and more fracturing and infighting among his staff. The 2018 elections are a long way away, but Trump is off to a very bad start.

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