Susan Page

USA TODAY

USA TODAY's Capital Download convened a roundtable of White House veterans and scholars Monday to assess President Trump's first 100 days — a milestone he reaches Saturday — and to put his successes and setbacks in perspective.

Below are excerpts from that conversation, moderated by Washington Bureau chief Susan Page. Participants were Sara Fagen, former White House political director for President George W. Bush; Ronald Klain, former chief of staff for vice presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden; Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service; and Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. Comments have been edited for length and clarity. See the full discussion on USA TODAY's Facebook page.

Grading the start

What grade would you give President Trump’s first 100 days?

Stier: I would give him an incomplete. He doesn’t have his team in place. He’s not ready for a grade.

Fagen: I’d give him a B-minus ... in the context of what the market’s been doing and in the context of getting in my view a very highly qualified Supreme Court justice on the court.

Klain: When you’re president, incomplete, that’s not the way the job works. I’d say a D. ... There were no significant legislative achievements, no real movement on the agenda he promised voters in the campaign.

Hemmer: I’m going to go more for the D-plus, C-minus range.

Fagen: What historians and economists are going to look at as they grade this is what is the economy doing and did he get his achievements in place, and it’s not going to matter if it’s 100 days or 200 days or 300 days. If he gets them done, his grade is going to go up. If he doesn’t, he’s going to live in history as a C-level, D-level president.

Stier: I think 100 days do matter. 200 days do matter. The clock runs real fast. You don’t have the luxury of time and you don’t know what’s going to come over the horizon that’s going to take you off course, or your course. And that’s part and parcel of the job: The tyranny of the urgent overwhelms the important. You have to have your people in place, working well together to manage that very confusing environment. They don’t have that yet, and if you ask me, that is the most fundamental problem of the first 100 days and really hard to catch up.

A learning curve

Every president has a learning curve. What do you think has Trump learned in the past 100 days?

Fagen: He certainly has had to have learned that governing is a lot harder than campaigning. ... I think he now gets this is a lot more difficult, and your relationships with people change as well. It’s not just the job is harder to manage than you thought it was, it’s that your relationship with Congress is harder to manage than you thought it was. Your relationship with the press is a lot different. That may be the lesson he hasn’t yet learned. ... When you’re in a campaign environment, you’re running for something, you’re not in charge. He’s now in charge.

Hemmer: I think he’s also learned that Republican support is a lot sturdier than what he and a lot of people suspected as well. He’s had a lot of struggles in his first 100 days and yet his support among Republican voters has remained pretty high. ... There’s a sturdiness there that’s going to keep Congress on his side for a while.

Klain: Trump when he won every primary on Tuesdays would stand up and give these speeches about how he as president was going to bring the Democrats and the Republicans to the White House. He was going to solve problems. He didn’t really owe anything to the Republican establishment. He’d be kind of an independent president. I think that was part of his appeal to a lot of voters in the middle in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, that he would not be a partisan figure. And he’s turned out to be an extremely partisan figure. He’s really linked arms with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. He’s tried to work through the establishment in Congress. He’s done virtually nothing to reach out to Democrats in either the House or Senate. And to me that’s been a surprise.

Fagen: In fairness to President Trump, he’s learned certainly what President Obama learned and what President Bush learned the hard way, which is the partisan lines in Congress irrespective of the president are very dug in.

Challenges ahead

What are the big challenges ahead?

Fagen: Republicans given control really have no option but to get some of these things done. That doesn’t mean we won’t get in our own way. But if we end up in December with no major legislative accomplishments, I don’t see how the party continues to function as it exists today. ...

Politically, there’s nothing to campaign on for Republicans. They’ve controlled the waterfront. They’ve had a leader in the White House, who may or may not be philosophically aligned with them, but they’ve had the opportunity. You’re going to see the fractures that clearly exist today, they’re going to deepen and widen, and because we’ve had a two-party system for 200 years doesn’t mean we’re always going to have a two-party system.

Stier: If you look at recent presidencies and what got in their way, more often than not the problems were things that came to them that they just didn’t actually do a good job of managing their own storefront. For President Obama, whether it was the problems at the VA or the IRS or GSA. ... For President Bush, you had Katrina, obviously. ... One real positive I would say for President Trump is that he has come out earlier and with senior White House championship around the idea of, we need to make the federal government work better.

The Twitter president

What about Trump's use of Twitter?

Hemmer: I do feel like there is a parallel to the innovations that Franklin Roosevelt used with radio, that Jack Kennedy used with television. So their predecessors had access to these new technologies but they didn’t use them in new ways to connect personally with the American people. ... He is using it in a traditional kind of way, to use this new media to sidestep the old media and get his message out.

Klain: Brilliantly effective for rallying his core supporters, for feeding them the kinds of Trump-isms that got them to rally behind this man in a 17-way primary and make him the nominee, but horridly destructive for the idea of people coming together, for unity.

Fagen: His supporters and his detractors know exactly where he stands, every day.

Klain: He just needs to stop lying on Twitter. He needs to stop saying things that are wrong and untrue. There will eventually be a toll for that.

Fagen: I agree with that.

Klain: The presidential voice is very important. ... Trump fritters it away many days on Twitter.

Advice for the next 100 days

What advice would you give Trump now?

Hemmer: To take a deep breath and step back. One of the problems of the 100 days is that he was trying to do two-year-long legislation — and Congress was trying to do this too — two-year-long legislation in a 100 days. And that attempt to rush the things that he wants, to get those ‘W’s’ up right away whether it was the travel ban, whether it was the health care, failed because no one was taking the time and care and giving these things the space that they needed in order to become workable legislation or executive orders.

Klain: He does need to do more to reach out to Democrats, to reach out to people who didn’t vote for him, to try to be the president of all Americans, not just the president of his own supporters. He promised us the Art of the Deal presidency. There’s been very little art; there have been no deals. He really needs to deliver on those things if he’s going to be an effective president.

Fagen: Focus on the big things. Get big legislation through Congress. Figure out how to do that. If you do that, a tweet here or an attack on a reporter there isn’t going to matter in the final analysis of whether you’re successful or not. But if you don’t get anything accomplished, he’s done.

Stier: He needs to get his team in place.

Read more:

What did Trump tweet in his first 100 days?

The first 100 days of the Trump presidency

Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump: Comparing first 100 days of last six presidents

Analysis: A bumpy 100 days for Trump? Just wait for the 1,361 to follow