In the latest attempt by the Trump administration to find something - anything - of real significance in Trump's first 100 days (what he called a "ridiculous standard" even while saying that he was better at it than anyone else), Kellyanne Conway trotted out this interesting factoid: Trump was the first President since 1881 to have a SCOTUS nomination confirmed in the first 100 days.
What she failed to mention is that he is also the ONLY President to enter office with a SCOTUS vacancy waiting for him to fill, courtesy of a GOP-controlled Senate that held that seat open for the last 7 or 8 months of the Obama presidency by refusing to even consider Obama's nominee. It is very rare for an incoming President to be faced with a SCOTUS vacancy in their first 100 days; only three others have since 1881, and the vacancies all occurred late into the 100 day period. Trump was handed a gift, and he took advantage of it. Even with that, Mitch "Turtle" McConnell had to blow up a Senate rule in order to get it done.
So, yes, getting a SCOTUS nomintion confirmed is a big accomplishment - arguably his only one so far - but it doesn't have the historic significance Conway is trying to sell us.
Sean Spicer, doing his part, claimed that Trump has signed more legislation and EOs since Harry Truman. True, if you look at the overall number. But more than half of the EOs are merely directives for a department to review and report back on specific items - in other words, work assignments - and none of the legislation signed is significant. The most significant EOs he signed - the two Muslim bans and the threat to defund sanctuary cities - were slapped down by the federal courts as probably unconstitutional. His attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare failed once, and will probably fail again because the second bill is worse than the first one.
Trump blinked on the Wall and blinked again on cutting off payments to insurers in order to kill Obamacare. He reversed his positions on NAFTA, NATO, and China. This is the self-proclaimed "great negotiator". If he's learning anything so far it's that negotiating in politics is nothing like negotiating a real estate deal - it's a whole new level of negotiation that he was not prepared for, something he admitted yesterday in a Reuters interview in which he said he didn't think the job was going to be this hard. Not what he said while campaigning when he claimed it was going to be easy and that he was the only one who could do it.
As Chuck Schumer said in an interview today in response to Trump's statement about how hard the job really is - "Good morning!"
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