WASHINGTON—The president of the United States would not stop talking about the fraudulence of the election he had just won.

It was only three days into Donald Trump’s presidency, the very beginning of what should have been his honeymoon, but he was still consumed by his inconsequential loss in November’s popular vote. In interviews, on Twitter, in private meetings, Trump kept repeating the lie that more than three million people had voted illegally. Not only that, he announced he was launching a “major investigation.”

Here was a troubling breach of democratic tradition. The president was casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The president was sending the federal government on a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition because he believed nonsense from conspiracy websites.

And then the whole thing disappeared.

No investigation ever materialized. The president got distracted by other grievances. That was that.

If there is a perfect metaphor for Trump’s first 100 days, it is the vanishing saga of the imaginary illegal voters. Sound and fury, revealing impulsiveness and dishonesty and a tenuous connection with reality, resulting in a media storm and nothing else.

The story of Trump’s gong show of a young administration is a tale of broken norms of presidential behaviour. But it is also, just as importantly, about substantive norms prevailing. All the chaos has distracted from a whole lot of continuity.

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The man who promised that transformative change would be “so easy” has either failed in his attempts at big moves or declined to try them at all. The early tenure of the first reality-television president has been dramatic in the way that old soap operas are dramatic: captivating characters, multiple convoluted plotlines, not much changing any time soon.

It sure feels like things are happening. The Trumpman Show is an all-day, all-night, all-consuming spectacle, can’t-miss TV even if you desperately want to miss it.

There he is in the Oval Office, making another grandiose pronouncement. There he is in Kentucky, holding another campaign rally for some reason. Ignore Twitter for half an hour and you might miss Trump scolding an American ally, threatening a Republican congressman, casually suggesting a new international order.

The impression of pandemonium thrills Trump’s supporters, who see a take-no-prisoners dynamo shaking up the old elite order, and frightens Trump’s opponents, who see a swindler destroying decades of progress. Yet the defining feature of his presidency has been abject nothingness.

Trump, master showman, has been performing the appearance of doing things more than he has been doing things.

He has not a single legislative accomplishment of significance. He has been oddly slow to fill senior positions. His first budget included such cartoonish cuts that it was dead on arrival in Congress. Though he has busied himself issuing executive orders, many have been more like press releases than immediate acts.

His most important order, an incompetently written travel ban targeting Muslim countries, was blocked by the courts. His 100-day “Contract with the American Voter,” a commitment list to which he affixed his black-Sharpie signature, remains mostly unfulfilled.

One by one, he has discarded pledges to revolutionize U.S. foreign policy, shifting in almost every case to the status quo. Ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran? He’s not doing it. Taking on Cuba’s Castro regime? He has shown no interest whatsoever. Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem? “Not an easy decision,” he says now. Designating China as a currency manipulator? “They’re not a currency manipulator.”

He lost a senior appointee, national security adviser Michael Flynn, over a scandal related to communication with Russia. And the FBI continues to investigate whether his campaign colluded with the alleged Russian interference in the election, casting a legitimacy cloud over his every act.

Trump has simultaneously dismissed the 100-day benchmark as “artificial,” which is true, and claimed he has achieved more in 100 days than any previous president, which is laughable. By any objective standard, scholars say, Trump’s 100 days have been poor.

“I don’t think it’s even in the ballpark of the 100 days of other modern presidents,” said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina and executive director of the White House Transition Project, which provides information to incoming administrations. “This president’s not even in the farm club, let alone the major leagues.”

The issue, Sullivan said, isn’t that Trump hasn’t signed as many bills as Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom the concept of the first 100 days originated, or even Barack Obama. It is his failure to establish the kind of “reputation for competence” that would convince lawmakers to follow his lead in the future.

Trump was never expected to be a master legislative tactician, winning votes by navigating the intricacies of Congress. But he has not even been an effective bully. The kind of bluster that sounded persuasive to voters has fallen flat with people who actually understand how government works.

“I think the problem is that the president speaks to his general-election audience,” Sullivan said. “The election is over. And he doesn’t seem to have understood that.

“He needs to be speaking to the audience of Washington decision-makers. And that audience is sophisticated.”

Impassioned Democrats have mobilized to fight Trump, swamping town hall meetings and flooding Congress with pressure calls. Their efforts have swayed representatives from both parties. Other checks and balances, like the courts, have proven robust. But the most effective resistance to Trump’s agenda has been Trump’s own leadership.

The president who vowed to run government like a business has instead run government like his business, a well-marketed luxury brand barely masking behind-the-scenes disarray. The ineptitude of Trump and his team has turned the most routine of presidential acts — a statement commemorating Holocaust victims, for example — into needless controversies. Policy negotiations have consisted of the Great Dealmaker making empty threats and then making concessions.

Trump implausibly demanded immediate funding for his border wall in exchange for continued funding for Obamacare. He then capitulated to the Democrats. Trump warned he would make life difficult for the leader of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus if he didn’t support Trump’s health-care plan. Mark Meadows just ignored him. Administration officials suggested he was preparing to announce his intention to withdraw from NAFTA. When the leaders of Canada and Mexico called and asked him not to, he quickly announced he would stay in the deal.

“I think he’s used to a situation where he just gets his way and doesn’t have to work with anyone,” said Angel Padilla, a co-founder of the leading opposition group Indivisible. “He does not know how to govern. And that’s apparent in everything we’ve seen.”

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Trump is, indisputably, a world-class real estate salesman, and he has made expert use of the White House as a visual prop. On Wednesday, he had the Senate come over for an unusual briefing about North Korea. But even the Republicans left confused, unclear what the administration’s policy was or why they had been invited in the first place.

It is hard for Trump to marshal sophisticated policy arguments when he evidently lacks policy sophistication himself. Time and again, his attempts to achieve have been hampered by his own ignorance. It is not even clear if he knows what he himself believes.

His greatest flop was the collapse of his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. (He has claimed that his bill isn’t dead yet, and it appeared to have new life this week in the House of Representatives.) Even as he flailed to sell the American Health Care Act, he made clear that he wished he had instead chosen to pursue tax reform first. Only because of legal requirements, he said, was he forced to begin with health care.

In fact, there were no such requirements. He had been persuaded to start with health care by Speaker Paul Ryan, who wanted it that way. Unless Trump was lying, always a possibility, he had been led into an embarrassing mess because he didn’t know basic facts.

A month before he was forced to withdraw the bill from the House floor, Trump uttered the most revealing quote of his first 100 days.

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

There is no talking about Trump without talking about his unwavering base. A hundred days in, almost everybody who voted for him would do so again.

John Orr, a grain trader and Republican county chair in Nebraska, knows Trump hasn’t been able to achieve everything he wanted. But he does not blame Trump. In his view, the leading culprits include obstructionist “establishment types” and a biased media.

Trump voters, Orr said, know it will take time for the president to overcome such entrenched interests. And they are pleased with his successes to date.

No Trump triumph was as momentous as his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Even if Trump’s presidency is a four-year disaster, the 49-year-old conservative could well be shaping the nation’s laws for 30 years.

“A lot of folks were fearful of who Hillary [Clinton] would appoint for the Supreme Court. So Gorsuch getting confirmed — a lot of the other things don’t even matter to a lot of people,” Orr said. “Given the circumstances, I think he’s done all he can, basically.”

Trump has done more than get Gorsuch confirmed. He has approved the Keystone XL oil pipeline, abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership once and for all, ordered a toughening of “Buy America” trade policies. The jury is still out on his pinprick missile strike on Syria in retaliation for a chemical attack on civilians, but it was applauded by a bipartisan array of policy experts disenchanted with Obama’s inaction.

The Syria strike was a flip-flop on his vow not to target Bashar Assad. He has reversed himself on a wide variety of domestic and foreign policy issues. He has stood firm, however, in his antipathy to Muslims and illegal immigrants.

Though Trump has irked some anti-illegal-immigration activists by dumping his promise to cancel Obama’s protections for “DREAMers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, he has empowered enforcement agents to far more aggressively deport people, and they have. His hard line appears to have scared thousands into staying in Mexico rather than attempting to cross.

Gorsuch aside, his most significant early impact has come through the preliminary moves of the agencies he has handed over to hard-right appointees. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said he plans to sharply curb federal efforts to foist reforms on police forces abusing civil rights. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has begun to turn the agency away from Obama-era efforts to combat climate change.

Environmentalists say Trump has made little progress even on rescinding Obama orders and rules on which he doesn’t need congressional help. But it appears to be coming. Off-camera, away from the bright lights of Trump’s travelling circus, his team has set the wheels in motion for a vastly different policy era.

But tallying policy achievements and non-achievements fails to do this presidency complete justice. The normal scorekeeping methods presuppose that the administration is normal.

This one is not close. Where on the scorecard does one put “takes governing instructions from Fox News segments?” What about “impugns the ethics of own FBI director?”

In Trump’s first 100 days, he has attempted to discredit federal judges, worked to convince the public that the news media is an “enemy of the people,” falsely accused his predecessor of committing serious crime in cahoots with U.S. intelligence agencies. While he is not even close to the “fascist” some critics said he would be, he has waged a running war on the credibility of democratic institutions.

In the process, he has damaged his own credibility, perhaps irreparably. The April case of the missing aircraft carrier — Trump and his team suggested it was steaming toward North Korea when it was heading the other way — merely confirmed a conclusion world governments had already drawn: nothing this president says can be trusted.

He is averaging 2.2 false statements per day in office, telling lies about subjects as irrelevant as his television ratings. A couple of them have caused international incidents. When Trump falsely told a crowd that something terrible related to terrorism happened in Sweden the night before, or falsely told an interviewer that Korea used to be part of China, he did real damage to his country’s reputation.

What’s most striking in transcripts of his remarks is not the mendacity. It is the incoherence. Stripped of his vocal flourishes, the words of his first three months reveal a president out of his depth, alternating between petty fixations and buzzwords he is sounding out without any evident understanding of what they mean.

Gripping soap opera, yes, but this is also the presidency as hard-to-watch amateur improv act — its star a man playing some barely recognizable version of the part without control of his own tics.

“I can be more presidential than anybody, if I want to be,” Trump insisted late in the 2016 Republican primary. “I can be more presidential than anybody.” The inescapable conclusion from his first 100 days is that this was a lie, too.

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