“One hundred days is the marker, and we’ve got essentially two-and-a-half weeks to turn everything around,” said one White House official. "This is going to be a monumental task.”
For a president who often begins and ends his days imbibing cable news, the burden has fallen heavily on a press team that recognizes how well they sell Trump’s early tenure in the media will likely color the president’s appetite for an internal shake-up.
So the plan now isn’t to actually accomplish anything in Trump’s first 100 days. It’s just to convince the public that Trump did accomplish something.
Mike Dubke, Trump’s communications director, and his deputy, Jessica Ditto, kicked off the discussion of how to package Trump’s tumultuous first 100 days by pitching the need for a “rebranding” to get Trump back on track.
In a White House whose idea of “leaving everything on the field” involved a bare two weeks worth of work and a handful of meetings on a health care plan, Operation Delusions-of-Adequacy is turning into a huge effort.
Staffers, including counselor Kellyanne Conway, were broken into three groups, complete with whiteboards, markers and giant butcher-block-type paper to brainstorm lists of early successes. One group worked in the hallway.
Note that all this is happening not to accomplish something. But to make it look like they’ve accomplished something. If you’ve actually had real success, you don’t need three teams of people to “brainstorm” successes.
“It made me feel like I was back in 5th grade,” complained another White House aide who was there. “That’s the best way I could describe it.”
But honestly, isn’t 5th grade a promotion from the usual state of the Trump White House? Trump’s media sales team has come up with a plan. Trump will repeat his claims about all those jobs that he had nothing to do with, he’ll thump his chest over Syria, and he’ll think of something to suggest that he’s draining that swamp. Poof! Prosperity, security, and accountability. Who can complain about that?
This imaginary Trump sounds like quite a guy, and his imaginary accomplishments are definitely many orders of magnitude less harmful than the ambitions of the real Donald Trump.