The Dizzying Effect of Trump's Roller-Coaster Presidency

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on March 30, 2017 Soon after Don­ald Trump was elec­ted pres­id­ent it be­came strik­ingly clear that these would be no or­din­ary times, to bor­row the title from Dor­is Kearns Good­win’s book about Frank­lin and Elean­or Roosevelt dur­ing World War II. Any com­par­is­on with the Roosevelts ends there, but the con­clu­sion that there would be no nor­mal days is even more true now than it ap­peared four months ago. The pe­cu­li­ar cam­paign, the split pop­u­lar-elect­or­al vote out­come, the fail­ure of the pub­lic to rally round the vic­tori­ous pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate (even George W. Bush, whose 2000 vic­tory was con­tested all the way to the Su­preme Court, got a bump com­ing in­to of­fice), the lack of a hon­ey­moon without par­tis­an bick­er­ing, and un­pre­ced­en­tedly bad polling num­bers for the new pres­id­ent un­der­scored the ex­traordin­ary nature of Trump’s rise to the highest of­fice in the land. To say that Pres­id­ent Trump’s le­gis­lat­ive agenda and re­la­tions with Con­gress are still a work in pro­gress would be a gross un­der­state­ment. All new ad­min­is­tra­tions go through a bumpy shake­down cruise, but