Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Monday marks the end of President Donald Trump’s second month in office. And once again, it was a month dominated by news coverage of President Donald Trump.

He plunged into a ferocious battle over Obamacare, delivered his first speech to Congress, released his first budget blueprint and revised his controversial travel ban. He also accused his predecessor of tapping his phones, demanded a congressional investigation of his accusation, and then refused to withdraw it even after the investigation swiftly debunked it. If that didn’t seem presidential—well, it actually was, because Trump is the president. And he’s been a perpetual presidential motion machine, signing executive orders, announcing new policies, attacking the media and bragging about how much he’s getting done.


But he hasn’t gotten much done.

Trump signed only one substantive piece of legislation since February 20, repealing a minor Obama administration rule that made it harder for the mentally ill to buy guns. Otherwise, in Month Two his impact on the laws of the United States consisted of renaming a veteran’s health clinic in western Pennsylvania and signing two symbolic bills about the importance of encouraging more women in science and technology fields. His push to repeal Obamacare is stumbling on Capitol Hill; his budget seems dead on arrival; his revised travel ban, like the original, has been blocked by a judge. He made big splashes with executive orders purporting to roll back Obama-era environmental rules, but in reality they merely announced his desire to roll back those rules. He did fill four more slots in his Cabinet, but three slots remain empty, and below those headline jobs the vacancy problem in his administration is becoming extreme: Overall, according to the Partnership for Public Service, he has only filled 20 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation—and has not even picked a nominee for 497 of them.

It’s still early, of course. If you think of Trump’s four-year term as a 24-hour day, we’ve only finished the first eventful hour. Presidential actions that seemed so astonishing a few weeks ago—firing the acting attorney general, hanging up on Australia’s prime minister, attacking Nordstrom’s for dropping Ivanka’s clothing line—are already slipping down the national memory hole. Trump has so dominated our consciousness since January 20 that it’s easy to lose track of time and even easier to lose perspective. Many of Trump’s critics and supporters mistakenly assumed that the extremely conservative team he’s been assembling would join forces with the Republican-controlled Congress to steamroll former President Barack Obama’s foreign and domestic legacy overnight; they would be making a similar mistake now if they assumed that his entire presidency would continue to be a festival of ineffectual bumbling and noisemaking.

So far, though, the Trump presidency has been strikingly thin on lasting accomplishments, and presidents don’t usually find it easier to get things done as time passes, especially when there’s scandal in the air. Trump did greenlight the Keystone and Dakota pipelines that Obama had held up, while his Department of Homeland Security has already taken a much stricter stance on undocumented immigrants. And he’s certainly signaled a new approach to foreign policy with his relentless hostility to Mexico, his odd chumminess with Russia, and his White House’s groundless and inexplicable claim that the British were also spying on him. But the laws that were in place under Obama are still the law, and almost all the rules that preceded Trump are still the rules, even if Trump’s regulators seem unlikely to enforce some of them. In our review of Trump’s first month, we quoted the sage advice Bill Walton learned from Coach John Wooden: Don’t mistake activity for achievement. The advice remains sage even when the activity gets a lot of clicks and cable news hits.

So one recurring theme of this fourth installment of POLITICO’s Did-It-Matter-Meter—in which we rate TrumpWorld news according to the immediate impact as well as potential long-run significance—is that his second month, like his first, was more about words than deeds. But words matter, too. And Trump’s are unlike any in history.

The WTF Presidency

Last month’s most shocking news, if not exactly its most surprising, was Trump’s claim that President Obama tapped his phone, which would be a much bigger deal than Watergate if it were true, except that it isn’t true. Trump later suggested that he never really made that specific claim, although he did—it's still on his Twitter feed—and he’s now back to arguing that it’s true, even after the Senate Intelligence Committee and his own Justice Department debunked it. It’s hard to believe that the president of the United States would tell such a flagrant lie, and then lie about the lie, but that’s where we are in March 2017.

It’s kind of a big deal. Political incorrectness was a big part of Trump’s political appeal, and it does sound cool in theory to have a president who’s willing to say anything, but in practice it turns out that Trump really is willing to say anything, no matter how factually as well as politically incorrect. He barely paused after his surreal attack on Obama before launching a new surveillance slander against the British, who are supposed to be America’s closest allies and intelligence partners. Trump got his start in politics with brazen lies about Obama’s citizenship, and if he learned anything on his journey to the White House, it clearly wasn’t the importance of truth-telling. A few hours before his speech to Congress, he told a group of news anchors that he would call for immigration reform, and after they filed reports about his surprising pivot, he didn’t. It’s hard to know exactly how much the stuff Trump makes up about his unprecedented inaugural crowds, the unprecedented crime rate or the 3 million illegal Hillary Clinton voters hurts America’s credibility, but it can’t help. And there will surely be times over the next four years when America will need its credibility.

Immediate impact: 5. Potential significance: 9.

Drip-Drip-Drip on Russia

The imaginary wiretapping scandal might have made the United States look like one of those banana republics whose dictators wear oversized sunglasses, but at least it changed the subject from Trump’s ongoing Russia mess, which had just erupted anew over the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions apparently misled Congress about his contacts with Russian officials during the Trump campaign. The wiretapping fictions would also overshadow the remarkable news that Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who abruptly quit last month after lying about his own contacts with Russian officials, was a paid agent of Turkey—a close Russian ally—while serving on Trump’s campaign.

There is now an official Senate investigation into Russia’s efforts to elect Trump, and it’s becoming one of those who-knew-what-when scandals that don’t usually fade away quietly. There are weird headlines every day—about Trump adviser Roger Stone’s chats with a shadowy hacker called Guccifer 2.0, about Russian diplomats around the world who keep joining the ranks of the not-breathing, about a litany of Trump campaign advisers linked to Russian operatives for reasons that presumably don’t involve electoral votes in Moscow. This is the background music for the Trump era, and there will be times when it becomes the main music.

Immediate impact: 4. Potential significance: 9.

Repeal and Regret

Republicans have been talking about repealing Obamacare for seven years, but they couldn’t do it when they didn’t control Washington. Now they control Washington. But they are having some real problems repealing Obamacare.

Their basic problem is that hardly anyone likes their repeal-and-replace legislation. The Congressional Budget Office found that it would increase the uninsured rolls by 24 million, cut Medicaid by 25 percent and jack up premiums for older Americans, while delivering a gigantic tax cut for the richest Americans. Groups representing doctors, hospitals, patients and seniors all came out against it. Democrats in Congress all hate it, and quite a few Republicans believe its Medicaid cuts are far too severe, while quite a few other Republicans believe its Medicaid cuts aren’t severe enough. GOP leaders are now scrambling to try to salvage it, but the more Americans hear about it, the more they seem to prefer Obamacare.

Trump has at times suggested that he’s not wildly enthusiastic about the details of the bill or the fact that Speaker Paul Ryan brought it up before tax reform, but he’s generally embraced it and declared that it needs to pass. So its fate will be a good test of his juice on Capitol Hill. Of course, its fate will also determine the future of the American health care system. And its fight might determine whether or not Republicans keep their majorities in Congress. Today, it’s not even clear whether passing the bill will make that more or less likely.

Immediate impact: 3. Potential significance: 9.

A (White) House Divided

Politics is serious business, and any White House has the power to affect all of humanity. But if you try not to think too hard about the stakes for health care or the climate or America’s standing in the world, there's been a delicious run of stories of infighting and backstabbing and brown-nosing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, full of obsequious and Machiavellian aides jockeying for physical proximity to Trump. And aside from what the insider leaks tell us about the president—who usually comes off as desperate for flattery, clueless about policy and prone to tantrums about bad media coverage—they also reveal emerging factions that could have major policy implications.

So far, the most important internal fault line seems to be the foreign-policy rift between Grownups and Revolutionaries, between Washington establishment elites who favor a reasonably traditional approach to the world and unconventional Trump loyalists (led by chief strategist Steve Bannon) who want to blow up traditional approaches to everything. The elites won a huge victory when Flynn lost his job and Trump replaced him with Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a well-respected warrior-scholar who wrote a book about the importance of standing up to the president. But in Month Two, the adults have been taking it on the chin. Trump blocked McMaster’s effort to reassign the National Security Council’s 30-year-old senior intelligence director. The White House has also prevented the two most prominent grownups, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, from appointing any deputies. Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner both attended the president’s recent meeting with Saudi leaders; astonishingly, nobody from Defense or State was on the guest list. Mattis told Congress that climate change is a vital national security threat, but Trump’s budget gutted funding for climate programs—and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, publicly declared that the administration considers all of it a waste of money.

It’s been amazing to watch the public humiliation of Tillerson, a corporate titan who led a vast empire as CEO of ExxonMobil before coming to Washington. Nobody even bothered to book him a hotel in Bonn for his first G-20 summit, so he had to stay in a sanitorium a half hour outside the city. The White House has made no effort to even pretend that he’s in or even near the loop; foreigners who want something from Trump call Kushner, who is officially taking the lead on Middle East issues, and unofficially on everything else. It’s a comedown for such a once-powerful CEO, and it’s also a comedown for the State Department, and for the Grownup coalition. It’s not clear how that’s affecting U.S. diplomacy so far, but it could in a big way down the road.

Immediate Impact: 4. Potential Significance: 8.

The Expectations Game

Trump’s best day in the White House to date was the day after his speech to Congress, when the president enjoyed a rare torrent of positive press. He did not say anything particularly new in his speech, and in the highlight, his shout-out to the widow of a Navy SEAL killed in a Yemen raid, he seems to have described a successful raid with little resemblance to the raid that actually occurred. The reaction was not uniformly positive; some of us thought he sounded like a parody of a promise-the-moon politician. But the general consensus was that Trump had vastly exceeded expectations, reading a solid, coherent, almost conventional political speech that cut down on his use of flagrant falsehoods, dystopian rhetoric and even the word “I.”

The positive press was quickly overshadowed by the breaking news about Sessions and the Russians, cutting short the closest thing to a honeymoon period that Trump has enjoyed. But it was an instructive moment, partly as a reminder that Trump is capable of behaving in relatively normal ways, but mostly as an illustration of how easy it can be for him to exceed the expectations he has set. The media have become so accustomed to his constant violations of longstanding norms that it has become newsworthy when he doesn’t violate them. This won’t be the last time he’s bathed in praise for doing something unremarkable.

The flip side of this phenomenon is even more important: His constant violations of longstanding norms no longer feel like news. For example, there was a flurry of early coverage about Trump’s ethical transgressions—his refusal to divest from his businesses, the doubling of membership fees at Mar-a-Lago, the foreign diplomats currying favor by booking the Trump Hotel in D.C.—but it faded quickly. The extraordinary became ordinary in a hurry. In his second month, China rushed through long-awaited trademarks for his Trump brand shortly after he agreed to respect its One China policy, but it barely made news. The bar for Trump has been lowered, and the bar for Trump-being-unethical news—or Trump-being-untruthful news, for that matter—has been raised. That normalization will benefit him bigly over time.

Immediate impact: 1. Potential Significance: 6.

A Hatchet Budget

Trump’s budget blueprint is not going to become law, because presidential budgets never do, but it is an important statement of his priorities, because presidential budgets always are. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was a leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, and in many ways Trump has released an ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus budget. Trump didn’t campaign as a right-wing ideologue on domestic policy, but his budget calls for an assault not just on government waste but on government, period.

Trump’s top budget priority was guns over butter. He proposed a $54 billion increase for the military, and a $54 billion decrease in other spending, with cuts for almost everything except border security and immigration enforcement. Mulvaney also pointed out that Trump was choosing hard power over soft power; the State Department was one of the hardest-hit agencies, reflecting Trump’s disdain for traditional diplomacy. And the single hardest-hit agency was the EPA, reflecting Trump’s lack of interest in environmental protection. It’s hard to imagine the leader of a developed nation in 2017 ditching all climate funding, but that’s what Trump wants to do; his budget actually said NASA’s climate research was overly “Earth-centric.”

Again, Congress might not do much of what Trump wants. But over the next four years, Trump will have a chance to do plenty of what Trump wants. And he is already making it clear what he wants.

Immediate Impact: 2. Potential Significance: 9.

Show Horse Governing

This week, Trump is expected to sign an executive order about Obama’s Clean Power Plan—the big 2015 regulation that limited carbon emissions from power plants—and you can be sure the media will cover it as Trump rolling back the Clean Power Plan. But Trump can’t roll back the Clean Power plan with an executive order. He can only direct EPA administrator Scott Pruitt to try to roll back the Clean Power Plan. Everyone already knows that Pruitt will try to do that—as attorney general of Oklahoma, he’d already sued the federal government to block it—but nobody knows whether he’ll succeed. And Trump’s executive order won’t help or hurt his efforts.

Trump has signed similar executive orders signaling his commitment to undo Obamacare and Obama’s Wall Street reforms, and last month, Obama’s fuel-efficiency standards for cars and “Waters of the United States” rule protecting wetlands. Perhaps the orders made him look like he’s keeping his promises—and they probably helped advocacy groups raise money to stop him—but they were mostly glorified press releases. Last month, Trump signed similarly symbolic executive orders reorganizing the executive branch—well, directing Mulvaney to produce a plan to reorganize the executive branch—proclaiming his commitment to historically black colleges and universities, and ushering in a new era of regulatory reform—or, in reality, requiring agencies to appoint regulatory reform officers who will serve on a regulatory reform task force that will produce regulatory reform reports. That is messaging, not governing. Governing is a lot harder.

Again, Trump still has 42 months to start governing. So far, he has been more show horse than work horse. But there might come a time when all that activity starts turning into achievement.

Immediate Impact: 1. Potential Significance: 3.

