#OyVeyDonaldTrump's first 100 days ranked the very worst for any President except for William Henry Harrison who died after just 31 days in office after catching pneumonia at his outdoors inauguration ceremeony

Franklin D. Roosevelt invented the idea of a president’s first 100 days. Roosevelt was actually referring to the first 100 days of a special Congressional session to fight the Great Depression, as Robert Speel of Penn State notes. But the idea soon came to mean the 100 days that start on Jan. 20 and that, for President Trump, will end on Saturday.
No doubt, you’ve seen a torrent of coverage in recent days of the milestone. And while it’s certainly an arbitrary milestone, it’s also a meaningful one. Presidents are at their most influential in their early months, which makes that period a particularly important one for a presidency.

Here’s my reading of Trump’s start: It’s the least successful first 100 days since the concept existed.

Even if you forget about the content of his actions — whether they strengthened or weakened the country — and focus only on how much he accomplished, it’s a poor beginning. His supporters deserve to be disappointed, and his opponents should be cheered by how unsuccessful he has been so far.

Before now, the weakest starts probably belonged to Bill Clinton and to John F. Kennedy. Partly as a result, neither of them ended up being as consequential presidents as, say, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. And yet Trump’s first 100 days have been vastly weaker than Clinton’s or Kennedy’s:

Trump has made no significant progress on any major legislation. His health care bill is a zombie, and he’s only now releasing basic principles of a tax plan. By contrast, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had made substantial progress toward passing tax cuts, and Barack Obama had passed, among other things, a huge stimulus bill that also addressed education and climate policy.

Trump is far behind staffing his administration. Trump has made a mere 50 nominations to fill the top 553 positions of the executive branch, as of Friday. That’s right: He hasn’t even nominated anyone for 90 percent of its top jobs. The average president since 1989 had nominated twice as many, according to the Partnership for Public Service.

Part of the reason is a lack of execution: The administration has been slow to make nominations. And part of the reason is who is being nominated: A disproportionate number of affluent investors and business executives with many potential conflicts of interest that require vetting. Either way, the effects are real. The executive branch can’t push through the president’s priorities if it doesn’t have his people in place.

The Trump administration is more nagged by scandal than any previous administration. No new administration has dealt with a potential scandal anywhere near as large or as distracting as the Russia investigation. It could recede over time, true. But it also could come to dominate the Trump presidency.

Trump has no clear foreign policy. Is he protectionist, as he appeared to be when starting a trade spat with Canada on Tuesday, or a globalist, as he appeared when backing off his criticism of China? Is he an isolationist, an interventionist or some alternative? No one seems to know, which confuses allies and does a favor for rivals who would welcome diminished American influence.

Trump is by far the least popular new president in the modern polling era. His approval rating is just 41 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. All other elected presidents since Roosevelt have had an approval rating of at least 53 percent after 100 days. (Gerald Ford was at 45 percent.) Some, including Obama, Reagan and Johnson, have been above 60 percent.

Trump’s low approval isn’t only a reflection of his struggles. It also becomes a cause of further struggles. Members of Congress aren’t afraid to buck an unpopular president, which helps explain the collapse of Trumpcare.

Obviously, Trump can claim some successes on his own terms. Most consequentially, he has named a Supreme Court justice who could serve for decades. Trump has also put in place some meaningful executive orders, on climate policy above all, and he has allied the federal government with the cause of white nationalism, as Jonathan Chait wrote.
Trump remains the most powerful person in the country, if not the world. It would be foolish for anyone to be complacent about what he can do. Yet by the modern standards of the office, he is a weak president off to a uniquely poor start.

It’s worth considering one final point, too. So far, I’ve been judging him on his own terms. History, of course, will not. And I expect that a couple of his biggest so-called accomplishments — aggravating climate change and treating nonwhite citizens as less than fully American — are likely to be judged very harshly one day.

For a different take on Trump’s first 100 days, read Ross Douthat’s column today. The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Frank Bruni’s look at a university’s efforts to help underpriveleged students and Dawn Eden Goldstein on the Pope’s comparison of refugee camps to concentration camps.

Ivanka Trump.... hardly a good Ambassador for Working Women

Ivanka Trump at a meeting at the White House in February. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Ivanka Trump will now have an official job at the White House. It’s an unpaid role as an adviser to her father, the president, but it comes with an office, a title and, presumably, an even higher perch from which to fashion herself as a crusader for working women.

“Policies that allow women with children to thrive should not be novelties — they should be the norm,” she said at the Republican National Convention last summer. She has written a book, to be published in May, called “Women Who Work.” In her very own West Wing office she will shepherd policy related to “women in the workplace,” according to her lawyer. In April she’s headed to a summit meeting in Berlin on women in the work force.

While Ms. Trump may want to be the new face of working motherhood, the reality of the policies she has devised for her father diverge starkly from her rhetoric. They offer very little to most parents, especially the ones who really need the support.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump unveiled his daughter’s plan for six weeks of paid leave for women who give birth. When pressed, Ms. Trump made it clear that her policy was tailored specifically for coping with childbirth and was not meant for new fathers or parents who adopt.

It’s a plan that is likely to hurt all working women more than help them.

Employers are already more hesitant to hire mothers than other candidates, male or female. Part of what they fear, fair or not, is investing in an employee who will then leave to care for her children for some unknown period, taking all her training and knowledge with her and requiring the company to spend resources hiring a replacement.

Their anxiety will be amplified if women are afforded time off from work for a new child and men aren’t. If only mothers get a paid leave benefit when their family welcomes a new child, the stigma falls squarely on one gender.

That stigma then spreads from mothers to all women, even if they don’t have or plan to have kids. Any female employee within a certain age range becomes a risk if she could decide to take six weeks off at some point. Women are transformed into potential mothers and therefore potential costs.

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

Experience elsewhere offers some evidence that this is what will happen. On the whole, other developed countries — all of which ensure new mothers get paid leave — are attracting and keeping more women in their work forces than the United States. But there can be negative consequences depending on how they do it. Research has found that giving mothers long leaves that don’t apply to men depresses their earnings and makes them less likely to move up to higher positions. Other policies aimed just at women, such as a law in Chile that required employers with a large share of female employees to provide child care assistance, have had similar effects. Employers turn women away if they become more expensive than men.

The solution here isn’t complicated: Extend paid leave to all new parents. When California established gender-neutral paid family leave, the number of fathers taking time to be with their infants doubled. Women’s earnings and employment go up when men take more leave.

Ms. Trump and administration officials are reportedly now considering a plan that also covers fathers and adoptive parents and changes the funding structure, though a more expansive benefit program is going to be a very tough sell to Republicans in Congress.

The child care plan that Ms. Trump put forward isn’t much better than her paid-leave idea. Her proposal to allow parents to fully deduct the cost of care up to a certain limit would apply to all parents, unlike maternity leave. But it would give the biggest benefit to those who need it least. Even though it includes a tax credit for families with the lowest incomes, the bulk of the policy is a tax deduction, which is worth much more to those who owe the most taxes.

According to analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, families that make more than $100,000 a year would gobble up 70 percent of the total benefits. Those making less than $40,000, on the other hand, would get about a $20 boost to their incomes — not much compared with the thousands of dollars it can cost to put a child in day care. Yet poorer families spend a much larger share of their incomes on child care than those with more means.

These proposed child care tax credits, shortcomings and all, would cost the government $115 billion over the next decade.

Rather than offer a step toward something better later, Ms. Trump’s plan

could stymie progress. If she were somehow able to persuade members of Congress to pass a pricey child care plan that does nothing to address the real concerns for most families, it would allow them to claim they already did something about the issue and ignore other, superior solutions. Worse, she risks giving them sticker shock without actually doing anything for families that aren’t wealthy. Conservatives are already calling her plan “mammoth.” If a real, comprehensive solution were to come down the road, would they have any appetite for it after this?

The climbing cost of child care has led to a 5 percent reduction in women’s employment in the United States in the past two decades. The lack of investment in child care is another reason other developed countries surpass this country on the percentage of women in the work force. No wonder, when far more women than men say they’ve had to take long chunks of time off from work to care for their families. Meanwhile, mothers with steady child care are twice as likely to stay in their jobs. If they were all able to get their kids into early childhood education programs, mothers’ employment would increase by 10 percent. A tax benefit for rich families won’t do it.

The politics of paid leave and child care have certainly shifted: They’re now bipartisan issues, at least among some lawmakers. But it is important not just that the country adopt these policies, but what kinds of policies it adopts. If Ms. Trump wants to champion working women, she needs to offer more than photo ops and empty promises.

After #OyVeyDonaldTrump's bad weekend, online betting site says he probably won't last the year

You’ve probably heard about Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend. Reports say he spent a good chunk of it pretty angry as he raged over falling short in comparisons to Obama and then accusing him of wiretapping Trump Tower (lol). Turns out everyone else has noticed, too, and started shifting their bets on how long Mr. 45 will remain in office. From Salon:

British betting behemoth, Ladbrokes is speculating that Trump may not even finish out the year in office, offering 2 to 1 odds that Trump is replaced before the end of this year. To put it in perspective, those are the same odds that he’ll be replaced in 2021 (meaning Jan. 20, 2021). There’s even money that he’ll serve his full term — meaning no President Mike Pence — and 4 to 5 odds that he’ll leave office before the end of his term. As an added bit of trolling, Ladbrokes give 6 to 4 odds that he’ll visit Russia before the end of the year.

What do you think? Are they being too optimistic? Or perhaps they’re being too pessimistic? Weigh in below!