Media Ignoring Reality in Their 100-Day ‘Reviews’ of President Trump

We’ve all been in them, namely situations where you simply can’t win. It’s like choosing a place to go for lunch after church on Sunday – somebody in the family invariably won’t be happy with where you end up.

President Donald Trump probably wishes the dilemma he faces this week were as simple as selecting between Panda Express and Chipotle for the post-worship meal as the nation moves towards his “100 Days” mark on Saturday.

The media always attaches an outsized importance to the artificial cutoff date as though a president would be expected to accomplish everything he set out to do in a little over three months. No chief executive has ever lived up to the standard, but seeing as this time it’s every journalist’s favorite kicking boy—Donald Trump—the talkers are in an especially frenzied mood attempting to make the case that the country’s first true “outsider” president badly flubbed his opening act.

Trump on Friday downplayed the chatter, correctly labeling the “100 Days” as an impossible standard.

Louis Nelson of Politico reports, “President Donald Trump on Friday claimed that he won’t get the credit he deserves for the first 100 days of his administration, seeking to manage expectations around what he called the ‘ridiculous standard’ of the upcoming milestone date…

“While Trump has made good on some major campaign promises—including nominating and securing confirmation for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal—his early presidency has also been marked by some high-profile failures.”

Failures? First among the “failures” Nelson listed was the congressional GOP’s inability to agree on an Obamacare repeal and replace bill. The administration itself suggested a new version could be introduced as early as this week, most likely in an attempt to get it voted on before the “100 Days” expire. Maybe that was the plan all along … to put it off until now to give solving the issue a “dramatic” flair and therefore thwart the media narrative. They are politicians, right?

The Politico writer also indicated the halting of the President’s “travel ban” executive orders was a misstep, as if there’s anything humanly possible that can be done from the Oval Office to prevent leftist ideologue federal judges from issuing stays for political reasons that defy common sense and the Constitution.

Oddly enough, Nelson does seem to pass along begrudging credit to Trump for some of his foreign policy moves, most notably the president’s apparent warming relations with China and his get-tough approach to the Russians in Syria and the “mother of all bombs” that was dropped on ISIS caves in Afghanistan without any civilian casualties.

I suppose media members had to give Trump a token bit of recognition to soften up the ground for this week’s all-out assault on his domestic agenda. From the surface, it doesn’t look like much has been accomplished in the past 13 weeks as Congress has been singularly focused on health care, passing over a dozen measures under the Congressional Review Act (see below) and in the Senate, pressing the “nuclear option” button while confirming Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The media will certainly make hay over the fact Trump hasn’t yet addressed a number of the major items on his “100-day Action Plan to Make America Great Again,” but anyone who possesses even rudimentary knowledge of the way Washington works knows such a plan was ambitious to say the least.

Trump the candidate ran last year on the promise of coming to the White House and first, undoing as much of the Obama damage as he personally could achieve under his presidential authority and then two, pledging to push Congress hard to act on a plan to get America’s economy going again so people could start working and living better lives again.

There’s little doubt Trump has been a resounding success on point one. His string of executive orders (34 in all) served notice that things would be different under his leadership on topics such as energy production, trade, immigration and government reform, among other things.

These aren’t exactly the type of headlining “achievements” reporters gush over. Instead the media has fixated on distractions such as Trump’s early March tweets where the president accused predecessor Obama of wiretapping his campaign’s phones, an allegation that isn’t technically accurate but also contains a great deal of truth.

One action item that barely registered in the major newspapers and liberal cable TV shows was Trump’s early move to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, which bars the federal government from paying for abortions in foreign countries. The president also revived the moribund Keystone pipeline project that almost certainly would have withered under a Hillary Clinton presidency.

In other words, there’s been plenty of positive benefits from having Trump’s “phone and pen” in the White House. There’s been significant and measurable savings for taxpayers, too.

Tim Devaney of The Hill reports, “President Trump has saved taxpayers more than $86 billion in regulatory costs during his first three months in the White House, according to a new study from a conservative group (The American Action Forum).

“Since taking office, Trump and Congress have repealed 13 rules with the CRA. The CRA allows lawmakers to overturn recent rules they disapprove of with a simple majority in Congress, and send the action to the president for his signature.”

There’s little question Congress can and should do more to get going on the president’s agenda. Speaker Paul Ryan requires more than a little prodding to step off the establishment stump and as has been amply demonstrated by the past three months, the Democrats will use every procedural obstruction in the rules to stall as long as permissible in the Senate.

There are signs there will be new progress on the previously mentioned health care issue this week, but also on the much-anticipated tax reform initiative. It’s important to remember it took years for the government to get where it is today and it’s going to take well beyond 100 days to approach a lot of these topics.

Tell that to the liberal journalists. The truth is, many of the media’s “100 Days” stories could have been written before Trump even took the oath of office. All they would have had to do was write an article with “failure” in the headline and then fill in the blanks. Even if the GOP’s Obamacare fix would have passed they would have found another issue where there was little progress.

There’s still much left to do … but so far, Trump has a pretty good start at making America great again. {eoa}

This article was originally published at ConservativeHQ.com. Used with permission.