President Trump’s first month in office has been long on tweeted threats and broad promises of changes to come, but short of real action. For California, that might be a good thing.

For the 70-year-old businessman turned politician, it’s been a brusque introduction to the reality of government, where nothing is as simple as it seems and everything takes longer than expected. And that has to be especially frustrating for Trump, who won a shocking and unexpected victory in November as a can-do outsider who promised to instantly change the climate in the nation’s capitol.

“We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power,” Trump said in his Jan. 20 inaugural address. “From this day forward a new vision will govern our land.”

But since that day, the president has seen his plans for changes in such things as immigration policy, health care, budget priorities and business regulations stalled by the courts, Congress and the inevitable inertia that slows any and all efforts to radically redirect the path of a country of 325 million people.

“There’s been a lot of sizzle, but not a lot of steak,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University. “Moving government forward is a much heavier lift” than making promises in a campaign.

That gap between promises and practices is happy news for California and San Francisco, both Trump targets during his campaign and in the early days of his presidency.

He has slammed San Francisco for designating itself a sanctuary city and refusing in many cases to cooperate with federal immigration officials. In a Fox News interview this month, he threatened to cut off federal money to California if it declares itself a sanctuary state and a haven for people living in the U.S. illegally.

“If we have to, we’ll defund,” Trump said. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California.”

Then there was the president’s angry tweet after violent protests at UC Berkeley earlier this month forced police to cancel a speech by rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:

“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

A Jan. 25 executive order stated that sanctuary cities like San Francisco “have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic,” and said that the attorney general could cut federal grants to sanctuary cities.

But government money is still flowing into the city, the state and the university system, and there’s been no move to cut it off.

There’s no guarantee that will last, said Tony Quinn, a former GOP redistricting expert and political analyst.

“At some point, (the Trump administration) is going to get their sea legs and do what they’ve promised to do,” he said. “And a lot of California politicians aren’t going to like it.”

San Francisco already is getting ready for that day, talking about what federal money is vulnerable and how to shelter both people and programs that could be in jeopardy.

“Based on the political rhetoric during the campaign, San Francisco began preparing for potential actions by the incoming administration the day after the election,” Ellen Canale, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Lee, said in a statement. “We’ve explored legal options and in turn filed a lawsuit against the federal government that will protect our sanctuary city status.”

Lee has also allocated $4.5 million over the next year and half to nonprofit groups to defend roughly 35,000 immigrants facing deportation proceedings.

But Gov. Jerry Brown, for one, is eager to postpone that day of reckoning for as long as possible. While he’s defiantly pledged to battle Trump on issues like immigration, health care and climate change, he’s also argued that there’s room to cooperate.

He backed Trump’s call for new spending on infrastructure, saying in his Jan. 24 State of the State address that, “We have roads and tunnels and railroads and even a dam the president could help us with.”

And when Trump mentioned in a meeting with airline executives this month that the country doesn’t have one high-speed train, Brown was quick to tweet, “California’s ready.”

Brown “has put himself in a place to at least talk to Trump,” about California’s concerns, Quinn said, clearing the way for cooperation on things like the swift approval of the disaster declaration for Oroville Dam last week.

But transportation is where the one dig from the administration has come so far: On Friday, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao put $647 million for Caltrain to go electric on hold, likely at the request of California GOP congressmen. That means high-speed rail won’t be coming to San Francisco anytime soon.

It’s not an unusual situation for a new president to have early troubles, especially one coming from outside the traditional Washington orbit. Bill Clinton, for example, had plenty of political experience as governor of Arkansas, but struggled for better than a year as president, battling unsuccessfully for health care reform.

And while Barack Obama quickly moved a nearly $1 trillion financial stimulus bill through a Democrat-controlled Congress during his early days in office in 2009, he had the dubious advantage of a country so deep in recession that even his GOP opponents realized something had to be done.

But even Obama, with only a few years in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate, had experience with the daily frustrations of government. That’s something Trump lacks.

For Trump, “there’s a feeling that because he says something, it’s going to happen,” said Rafael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles. “He tends to make pronouncements ... he relies on the spoken word and Twitter, and we’ve never seen that before.”

But that talk doesn’t always lead to action.

On Jan. 25, for example, Trump tweeted that he would be “asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.”

The tweet sparked plenty of discussion, both inside and outside the White House, about what Trump has called the millions of illegal Hillary Clinton voters he says cost him the popular vote, despite a total lack of evidence that those “illegal” voters exist. But what it hasn’t brought about, at least not yet, is any actual investigation.

Trump has also vowed to use executive orders to quickly move his plans into practice. It hasn’t always worked out that way.

His most visible effort was a Jan. 27 order barring immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The hastily announced ban originally included green-card holders from those countries and people who already had received visas, splitting families and causing chaos at U.S. airports.

A federal court stayed the order, and Trump said in a news conference last week that a new and revised order is in the works.

While some of Trump’s orders worked as planned, such as one setting new restrictions for government officials becoming lobbyists after leaving government service, another withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and one speeding environmental reviews and approvals for “high priority” infrastructure projects, most have been little more than wish lists for future action.

Because only Congress can reverse Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s executive order could only say that his administration would “seek prompt repeal” of the law, and order some bureaucratic changes to make the repeal easier.

A wall on the Mexican border was a key Trump campaign promise, but his executive order could only call for federal funding of the wall, since Congress has to appropriate the money.

Trump is rapidly learning that while a president has a tremendous amount of power, the government was specifically designed to place limits on that strength.

“For any new president, it’s a challenge to go from campaigning to governing,” Sonenshein said. “In the campaign, you can say what you’re going to do, but now you have a government based on actual policies” needed to make that happen.

Early scandals like the questions about Russian influence that forced National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to resign last week and the battle with the courts over the immigration ban also have forced Trump and his team to spend less time on long-term plans and more on dealing with more immediate concerns.

“When you’re fighting fires, you can’t pay attention to both your message and the fires,” said McCuan of Sonoma State.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth