Sea change. An enormous one. That's the only way to understand President Donald Trump's first 100 days--as a breaking from and often a breaking of the Obama presidency.
Trump's first 50 days were a jumble of ups and downs, mostly downs. But beginning with the flawless testimony of Neil Gorsuch to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his subsequent confirmation under rules that will speed the way for future Supreme Court nominees, the Trump turnaround began and gained an almost uninterrupted momentum. The president's directive to strike Syria after it apparently rained poison on babies and toddlers was a defining moment, reinforced by using the "mother of all bombs" in Afghanistan and dispatching an armada of weaponry toward North Korea (no matter how indirect a route the ships took to arrive there).
All along, a legislative legacy was passing beneath the noses of Manhattan-Beltway media elites who could not be bothered to learn the wide-ranging implications of the baker's dozen of Congressional Review Act measures that passed the House and Senate by simple majorities and were signed into law by Easter. This is a legislative outpouring not exceeded in substantive impact by any modern president except Franklin Roosevelt, though others have seen more statutes passed. Yet because regulatory rollback bores or confounds journalists, these new laws were discounted or simply dismissed.
In fact, a law passed under the little-used Congressional Review Act not only repeals an existing regulation but also bars the affected agency from acting in the same area without explicit legislative approval. These measures will therefore reverberate for decades, whether by hamstringing public funding of abortion at the state level; narrowing the reach of environmental regulators over "waters of the United States"; or slapping down the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on hunting in Alaska.
Trump's Cabinet appointees, meanwhile, represent the most conservative collection of the modern era, and his national security team 2.0 (with H.R. McMaster taking the place of Michael Flynn as national security adviser) is at least the equal of any that has served since the end of the Cold War. Trump's sometimes loose campaign rhetoric on national security has been realigned with governing realities, underscored by assessments of how badly damaged the past eight years left the country.
Trump's most significant setback--the collapse of the repeal and replacement of Obamacare--is not yet a conclusive defeat. And a spate of executive orders has set the stage for regulatory relief across the federal government. Could Trump have done better? Of course. But what he has done is without question of historic and lasting impact.
Trump has been adapting and learning in his own, always unique and often far-too-unnecessarily-divisive way. Just imagine what the next three and two-thirds years can bring--if he minimizes the errors of the first 100 days and repeats the parts that have been greeted with broad-based conservative applause.
Editorial on 04/29/2017