Reality collides with Trump's promises
Reality collides with Trump's promises
The president proclaims a successful first month despite falling short on major pledges.
By Eli Stokols 02/19/17 03:53 PM EST
The Muslim travel ban, Trump’s most consequential and controversial executive order, one of 23 signed so far, lies dead in the courts. He has achieved no noticeable progress on tax reform. The White House is already facing multiple investigations by a Republican-controlled Congress while the intelligence community investigates possible collusion last year between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump has appointed just three of the 15 required deputy secretary Cabinet positions; fewer than 40 of the 700 key administration jobs requiring Senate confirmation have been filled.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Trump was “off to the worst start of a presidency in a very long time”—and that was two days after he’d taken office, before Trump's bellicose calls with foreign leaders, before his National security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after just 24 days in the job, before he attacked the nation’s independent courts and declared the media an “enemy of the American people.”
“There's no precedent in the modern history of the presidency for what we've seen over the last month,” said Republican operative Steve Schmidt. “If you combine the dishonesty, the sloppiness and incompetence, the result is deep concern and anxiety across allied capitals, glee in the capitals of foreign enemies, and an American public that regard him one month in with the lowest levels of support in the modern era. We’ve just never seen an American administration collapse from a credibility perspective as quickly as this one has.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-reality-promises-235198
