White House Reality collides with Trump's promises The president proclaims a successful first month despite falling short on major pledges.

President Donald Trump touts “incredible progress” in his first month in office. But the frenetic period that opened with an inaugural address about “American carnage” and ended with a raucous campaign rally has brought a spotty record that falls short of his promises.

Despite dizzying sound and fury, the president failed to halt immigration from Muslim countries, to label China a currency manipulator, to deliver a serious plan for funding his border wall or to repeal Obamacare—all among his many promises during last year’s campaign. He even weakened ethics rules affecting lobbyists, in the guise of a promised ban.


The Muslim travel ban, Trump’s most consequential and controversial executive order, one of 23 signed so far, lies dead in the courts. He has achieved no noticeable progress on tax reform. The White House is already facing multiple investigations by a Republican-controlled Congress while the intelligence community investigates possible collusion last year between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump has appointed just three of the 15 required deputy secretary Cabinet positions; fewer than 40 of the 700 key administration jobs requiring Senate confirmation have been filled.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Trump was “off to the worst start of a presidency in a very long time”—and that was two days after he’d taken office, before Trump's bellicose calls with foreign leaders, before his National security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after just 24 days in the job, before he attacked the nation’s independent courts and declared the media an “enemy of the American people.”

“There's no precedent in the modern history of the presidency for what we've seen over the last month,” said Republican operative Steve Schmidt. “If you combine the dishonesty, the sloppiness and incompetence, the result is deep concern and anxiety across allied capitals, glee in the capitals of foreign enemies, and an American public that regard him one month in with the lowest levels of support in the modern era. We’ve just never seen an American administration collapse from a credibility perspective as quickly as this one has.”

According to Gallup, Trump’s 40 percent approval rating after one month is 21 points below the historical average rating for new presidents in mid-February and 11 points below the lowest mid-February rating for any other new president.

In Great Britain, where Trump may not be extended the courtesy of an invitation to speak before both houses of Parliament, betting markets are seeing increasing action on the odds of Trump’s possible impeachment. "We’ve taken five times the amount of bets on him failing to see out his full term than on him doing so,” said Jessica Bridge, a spokesperson for Ladbrokes, a British betting market.

At his news conference last week, Trump touted what he views as significant accomplishments during his first month on the job, calling his talks with foreign leaders "enormously productive," noting that he has already instructed Secretary of Defense James Mattis to submit a plan to defeat ISIS, developed a new council to promote female entrepreneurs and outlined plans to bolster the military and local law enforcement agencies.

Mostly, he spoke in generalities. “I’m keeping my promises to the American people,” he said. “These are campaign promises. Some people are so surprised that we’re having strong borders.”

Trump appears likely to stick to those generalities with the general public, particularly among excited supporters who may be less concerned with the details and more interested in his commitment to decimating the Washington establishment.

“He’s beginning to understand where his power truly lies. Washington is not a safe space for Trump,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP consultant.

“Trump in the White House feels like a lion caged up in the zoo,” Haynes said. “When he escapes Washington, he is in his natural habitat and becomes his full and complete self. I expect him to find ways to spend more time outside of D.C., with the voters who made him their champion, as opposed to inside D.C., with the bureaucracy that is threatened by him and wants to emasculate him.”

Rallying supporters in Melbourne, Florida, Saturday evening, Trump reveled further in his unlikely electoral win and celebrated the “great movement” he leads, one that is defined mostly in opposition to large blocs and institutions: organized political parties, cultural and socioeconomic “elites” and, most of all, the mass media. “They could not defeat us in the primaries, and they could not defeat us in the general election, and we will continue to expose them for what they are, and most important, we will continue to win, win, win.”

If the scoreboard, aside from a healthy stock market, does not seem to reflect much winning just yet, Trump has an easy explanation — that he “inherited a mess,” a notable shift from his promise last July that “I alone can fix it.”

Now ensconced behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, Trump blames the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for striking down his travel ban, which was hastily signed without thorough vetting by legal experts and the agencies directed to implement it. He blames the intelligence community for leaking damaging information about Flynn and other investigations rather than the former adviser, who admitted to misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He blames nameless staffers for giving him false information and, more than anything, the media for its reporting stories he has taken to dismissing as “fake news.”

Despite those attacks on the media, Trump’s own credibility has been weakened by a torrent of falsehoods coming from top surrogates, his Twitter feed and his mouth: unsupported or easily disproved assertions about the inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, claims of fraudulent voting even though he won the election, the size of his Electoral College victory and, on Saturday, a passing statement about a recent terror attack in Sweden. (There wasn’t one.)

Though Trump’s victory validated his cult-of-personality approach to politics, it is no guarantee that the same approach will be effective when it comes to governing itself. Doubts are growing, for instance, among national security experts in both parties about the new administration’s preparedness for its first serious geopolitical test.

“The National Security Council hasn't even met formally. So that means that the very structure that is required in order to provide thoughtful and careful information to the president is not working right now,” Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as CIA director and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, said Sunday on NBC’s "Meet the Press." “What happens if there's a major crisis that faces this country? If Russia engages in a provocation, if Iran does something stupid, if North Korea does something stupid, and we have to respond, where is the structure to be able to evaluate that threat, consider it, and provide options to the president? Right now, that's dysfunctional, and that's what worries me a great deal.”

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were far more optimistic a month ago about realizing the potential of a governing moment in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House than they are now.

Although relieved that Trump nominated a competent and charismatic conservative, Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court, GOP lawmakers are increasingly frustrated by the president’s inability to focus and worry about their legislative agenda bogging down in a quagmire of daily controversies and petty fights. Many of them, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed dismay about the president’s constant tweeting.

Sen. John McCain, an elder GOP statesman with little to lose politically at the outset of his final six-year term, is emerging as one of his party’s most outspoken anti-Trump voices after delivering a speech this weekend to NATO allies in Munich that was a stunning rebuke to the president.

Suggesting the postwar global democratic order is now threatened by “an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism,” McCain lamented that the founders of the Munich Conference “would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.”

McCain went further in an interview broadcast Sunday morning on "Meet the Press," sounding an alarm about Trump’s constant efforts to undermine and weaken the media. “We need a free press. We must have it. It's vital. If you want to preserve — I'm very serious now — if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press.

“And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time,” McCain said. “That's how dictators get started.”