Vox:
“80 sets of invisible eyes rolling”: senators unimpressed by White House North Korea brief
Wednesday afternoon, nearly the entire membership of the US Senate packed into a bus and headed to the White House grounds for an unprecedented classified briefing from top Trump administration officials on North Korea policy. Such a huge meeting, on such a volatile topic, had people wondering — was the United States about to announce some risky new policy on North Korea? Perhaps some kind of scary military escalation, or even a preemptive strike on a nuclear-armed power?
Nope. According to senators who attended the briefing, it was a whole lot of nothing.
It’s actually all part of the long con Trump is pulling on his voters. So are health care amendments and resuscitation, and the bogus one page tax plan. Republicans can’t govern and Trump has no idea what he’s doing. They’ll catch on eventually.
WaPo:
Trump is about to be 0-4 on his legislative promises for his first 100 days
Unless he can summon a miracle, President Trump is going to reach 100 days in office without getting anything on his wish list through Congress. And the fact we're measuring his failures by this timetable is largely his fault.
First, what he promised to get done but hasn't:
Tom Nichols/USA Today:
Are Trump voters ruining America for all of us?
Those of us who criticized Trump voters for their angry populism were often told during and after the election not to condescend to our fellow citizens, and to respect their choices. This is fair. In a democracy, every vote counts equally and the president won an impressive and legitimate electoral victory.
Even so, the unwillingness of so many of his supporters to hold him to even a minimal standard of accountability means that a certain amount of condescension from the rest of us is unavoidable.
In every election, we must respect the value of each vote. We are never required, however, to assume that each vote was cast with equal probity or intelligence.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic with a long and important read:
Can the Democratic Party Reconcile Two Divergent Economic Visions?
In the party’s bid to regain power, centrists and Bernie Sanders’s allies offer seemingly incompatible strategies—that target wildly different voters.
But the same surveys also make clear that Trump is facing unprecedented resistance beyond that ardent base. National surveys consistently show his approval rating stuck at around 40 percent. That’s far lower than any other newly elected president at this point. His numbers are especially anemic among Millennials and minorities and far below the usual Republican performance with college-educated whites. Polls also show most Americans oppose many of his key policy initiatives, from building a border wall to repealing former President Barack Obama’s climate-change regulations.
…
The Democrats’ post-election debate has mostly focused on how the party can win back blue-collar and older whites who defected from Obama in 2012 to Trump, particularly in the Midwest. But given Trump’s inability to expand his support, the more relevant question may be how Democrats can consolidate the roughly 55 percent of Americans who have consistently expressed unease about him. That question points the party away from Trump’s working-class base toward those white-collar whites (especially women), minorities, and Millennials expressing the most discomfort about his performance, qualifications, and agenda.
Whenever a political party faces an “either/or” choice, the right response is almost always: “both/and.” This Democratic crossroads is no exception. Geographically that means the party, in the races for both Congress and the White House, must regain ground in the working-class Rustbelt states where Trump outperformed other recent GOP nominees and the more diverse, younger Sunbelt states where he slipped. “In the long term, the future for the Democratic Party is Florida, Arizona, Georgia, eventually Texas ... and maybe Ohio goes the other way [toward Republicans],” said Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann. “But given the map for 2018, and even 2020, I think relying on just that and not fighting in those Midwest states is a mistake.”
Larry Sabado and UVA Center for Politics:
The poll, conducted for the Center by Public Opinion Strategies, surveyed 1,000 Trump voters online from April 17-19 and has a margin of error of ±3.1 percentage points. Public Opinion Strategies also conducted eight focus groups in five locations from April 4-18 with both Trump voters as well as Republicans and independents who voted for Hillary Clinton or for a third-party candidate.
-- The breakdown of strong approvers vs. somewhat approvers largely mirrored Trump’s relative areas of strength and weakness in the campaign amongst the broader electorate: Men were likelier to be strong approvers than women (44% of men were strong approvers vs. 39% of women); respondents over 65 were the only age group where strong approvers outnumbered somewhat approvers (48%-46%); and, amongst respondents with differing levels of education, strong approvers narrowly outnumbered somewhat approvers only amongst those with a high school education or less (49%-47%), while voters with at least some college education were likelier to somewhat approve than strongly approve. (Full data are available in the poll crosstabs, linked below.)
Robert Schlesinger/US News:
Which brings us back to Donald Trump. He is – not unjustly – catching heat for accomplishing surprisingly little given Republican control of Congress. Other (legitimate) criticisms include his record low job approval ratings, his burgeoning ethical problems, his manifest ignorance of policy details, his serial mendacity ... the list goes on. Did I mention Russia? But here's the thing: Regardless of the success or failure of his first 100 days and regardless of whether he gets a "win" any time soon, he'll be president for another 1,361 days after the first 100 have passed. That's a lot of time to learn on the job and course-correct. Will he? As a unrepentant critics of his I remain deeply skeptical, but only time will tell. Maybe we'll look back at that litany as being rife with portents or maybe stocked with red herrings.
Instead of trying to measure Trump at 100 days let's set marks of, say, 20 months (September 2018) and then again at 45 months (October 2020). We'll have a far fuller picture of the man then – and will be able to act accordingly.
John Harwood/CNBC:
Pay attention to the man behind the curtain: Trump is no wizard of government
- As a candidate Donald Trump made numerous, grandiose promises.
- In his first 100 days, those campaign promises proved hard to fulfill.
Vox:
A historian on Trump's first 100 days: "Very little has been done"
Why Trump's presidency has floundered in its first 100 days.
Sean Illing
So what’s your judgment as a historian of Trump’s first 100 days?
H.W. Brands
Very little has been done. Nothing of legislative accomplishment. The big deal was going to be repeal and revision of the Affordable Care Act — that didn't happen. There was some thought that maybe a tax reform bill would get passed, but no, that's not going to happen. The things that President Trump has done so far are things that a president can do by himself with just the stroke of a pen. These are not nothing, though.
He has repealed or prevented from taking effect various Obama administration regulations. Those mean something to certain groups, but they don't have the kind of broad impact that legislation has, that programs that are approved by Congress have, because the fact that they can be rescinded by a stroke of a president's pen means they can be reimplemented with the stroke of another president’s pen.
Furthermore, they don't have legitimacy, the credibility, of having the approval of more than just one person. If you get major legislation passed, it has the approval of Congress and the presidency, and that means a whole lot more than if it's just the preference of a president.