Just weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, you would think that everything had changed. The uproar over the president’s tweets grows louder by the day, as does concern over the erratic, haphazard and aggressive stance of the White House toward critics and those with different policy views. On Sunday, White House aide Stephen Miller bragged, “We have a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration.”
But Miller was dead wrong about this. There is a wide gap, a chasm even, between what the administration has said and what it has done. There have been 45 executive orders or presidential memoranda signed, which may seem like a lot but lags President Barack Obama’s pace. More crucially, with the notable exception of the travel ban, almost none of these orders have mandated much action or clear change of current regulations. So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.
It is the illusion of a presidency, not the real thing.
Read on.
So far, the Republicans have confirmed some pretty terrible Cabinet Secretaries, but a combination of resistance within the departments and a lack of deputies and assistance being confirmed, it's been difficult for them to do damage. Not having any sort of replacement for the Affordable Care Act has led to their repeal plans heading in the wrong direction, giving people time to protest and leaving some Congresspeople with cold feet. Trump has made a couple of moves that could've been permanently devastating, and perhaps will be in the future, but the Muslim ban keeps failing in court and while ICE is doing some optically terrible raids, it's not clear that they're actually moving the needle as far as the number of detentions and deportations go (mostly because we always treat Latino immigrants crappily).
Question is, can this keep up for another 23 months, at the very least? It doesn't seem likely, but it seems more likely than it did three weeks ago and the administration's problems are mounting. Let's keep working!
UPDATE (2/13/2017, 9:24 PM): If Jeet Heer is right, here's something that could slow the bastards down some more:
Hypothesis: the Deep State is going to pick off the Trump administration one by one. Flynn was first because he's most vulnerable.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 14, 2017
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