The reviews are in. Great speech, what's next?
Story highlights
- The President woke up to positive speech reviews
- The implications of Trump's words already were shifting the landscape
(CNN)President Donald Trump nailed the performance art during his first address to Congress Tuesday night. But turning his solid reviews into tangible policy victories will be a lot more complicated and test more than his showmanship.
The
President woke up to a rare experience Wednesday: glowing reviews in
the media that he has nominated as an enemy of the American people.
"THANK
YOU" he tweeted, savoring a rare moment of universal praise in a young
presidency battered by self-detonated controversies and the political
residue of one of the most divisive elections in decades.
But as soon as the rowdy
Republican cheers stopped echoing through the House chamber on Tuesday,
the implications of the President's speech were already altering the
political climate across Washington.
The goals
It
is now clear that the success or failure of Trump's domestic presidency
at least will rest on a set of hugely ambitious, yet treacherous
political goals that he spelled out.
Those goals include repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act,
with a system that is better and cheaper than Obamacare. It's a task
fraught with pitfalls, questions of cost and access and legislative
complications.
Trump also proposed a sweeping reform of the tax code,
with vows to slash corporate rates and deliver a "massive" windfall to
the middle class. If it happens, it could shape up as the most ambitious
such overhaul since Ronald Reagan's epic tax reform bill.
Trump is also challenging Republican orthodoxy, promising to enact a $1 trillion infrastructure package, aimed at driving investment and jobs to the neglected blue-collar heartlands.
And hours before his speech last night Trump injected a new wildcard, raising the prospect of an immigration bill
that could offer a path to legal status for millions of undocumented
immigrants -- whom he had previously threatened to deport. All of that
is supposed to get done at the same time as Congress funds, and Trump
builds, his "great, great wall" on the southern border.
Roadblocks
All
of these policy goals share common characteristics -- they are so
complicated, impact so many people and will cut across so many political
constituencies -- that they will require an almost unimaginable level
of focus from the White House and lawmakers to stand any chance of
moving into law.
Immigration or tax
reform alone could consume Washington for years, and with Republicans
already eyeing mid-term elections and Democrats battling to gum up
Congress with procedural tricks, it's hard to see Trump's big plans
being fully realized.
There is also
little reason, so far at least, to suggest that the inexperienced White
House and the President himself have the political acumen and capital
needed to drive such a heavy agenda through Congress.
Only
this week, Trump complained that no one had realized how "complicated"
reforming health care could be -- a remark that raised eyebrows among
those who remember the Obamacare wars of the last presidency.
Art of the possible
The
key to Trump's hopes may lie in the temperamental dimensions of his
performance on Tuesday night rather than his still rather thin
explanation of policy.
The
President promised a new era of "American greatness" was at hand -- but
warned his audience: "The time for small thinking is over. The time for
trivial fights is behind us."
Presidents
get a lot of allowances in their rhetoric. But his warning might have
seemed rather rich to his opponents, coming from a commander in chief
who has made a habit of belittling his opponents, argued for days about
the size of his inaugural crowd and peddled untruths about millions of
illegal voters in the election.
Democrats
disputed the media narrative that the Trump on show on Tuesday night
represented an evolution of his political persona away from the dark
vision he laid out in his inaugural address.
"Actions
speaker louder than words, he has not done anything to unite," said
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on CBS "This Morning."
"The
speeches don't mean very much because what he says in his campaign, at
the inauguration, last night, aren't attached to reality, to his own
reality," the New York Democrat added. "His speeches are populist.
They're aimed at the working folks who supported him. But his governing
and what he does is hard right, favoring special interests over the
working class."
Bolstering
Schumer's case, the address came at the end of a period of ideological
definition by the White House, which included Trump's chief strategist
Steve Bannon's laying out of a populist, nationalist political creed
last week and details of a budget that will slash foreign aid and
environmental rule making.
If
Trump's tonal shift on Tuesday night did offer a glimpse of a new mode
of operation for the President, he could conceivably wrong foot his
opponents.
But it's one thing to
appear Presidential on prime-time television, from the speaker's
rostrum, framed against a vast Stars and Stripes and wallowing in the
cheers of a friendly crowd.
It's
another to consistently perform with presidential steel and cool through
the incessant frustrations and slights that make up a typical day in
Washington and to grow in the job, as all great Presidents have done.
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