Taking the true measure of a president, governor, mayor or even a corporate CEO usually requires the luxury of being able to wait and see how a chief executive's leadership survives the test of time.
Often it takes 10 years to get a good sense of it _ as we learned from the lesson of Harry Truman's presidency. He left office with very low ratings in the polls. But when historians looked back and saw how his visionary courage led to the revitalization of war-torn Europe (including World War II's vanquished Germany and Japan), they rated Truman a near-great president.
But it took not 10 years _ just 10 days _ for us to get one revealing, but also very disheartening, glimpse of how President Donald Trump's leadership will be measured by the test of time. Then it took a mere 10 hours for us to get a very different, and perhaps even positive, look at Trump's potential for becoming, at least sometimes, a leader-like chief executive.
August 2017, the month that gifted us with a rare total eclipse of the sun, also gifted workaday pundits with a rare head-start on history.
On Aug. 15, Trump signed a seemingly ho-hum executive order and chose to spotlight for reasons that were really about politics, not policy. Trump's order was revoking yet another of President Barack Obama's executive orders _ something he has often showcased to please his hardcore supporters, who during the campaign loved to hate Obama.
This time, Trump was revoking Obama's 2015 executive order that created a federal flood risk management standard. Obama's order required federally funded projects in flood zones to meet risk-management standards and called for new buildings to be elevated above anticipated flood levels.
Trump announced he had revoked Obama's order so the projects would "no longer" face "one job-killing delay after another." Trump didn't mention how his leadership decision would make Americans safer in the event of catastrophic floods _ or if he'd even thought about that. Whatever; his supporters dislike Obama, federal regulations, regulators and red tape. So it made him politically safer. What could go wrong?
Ten days later, Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, flooding the Texas coast lowlands with the most severe rainstorms in North America's recorded history. Heartbreaking news coverage flooded our compassionate country with reports of tragedies that befell Americans whose homes were built in flood-prone zones.
Trump abruptly re-focused America's attention to another staple of his populist crusade: the peril of illegal immigration.
On Tuesday, Trump's administration announced he was ending Obama's executive order program known as DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Never mind that it was only designed to protect the most innocent of victims _ youths who were brought into the USA as children by undocumented parents and grew into well-educated, military-serving, tax-paying residents of the only country they'd ever known. Trump gave Congress just six months to legalize DACA _ or else DACA youths would face deportation. Many Republicans joined Democrats in condemning their leader's decision.
But suddenly Trump seemed a clearly conflicted leader. He insisted he really loved these DACA youths (whatever that meant) and tweeted that if Congress failed to act in six months, he might "revisit" the DACA youths' plight (whatever that meant).
On Wednesday, Trump summoned Congress' four Republican and Democratic leaders to the Oval Office _ and what happened next shocked all four of his guests.
Trump blindsided his fellow Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, and struck a deal with the stunned Democratic leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Trump agreed to a plan to avoid a government shutdown by accepting a three-month increase in the debt ceiling, tied to funding for areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey _ the same Democratic deal Ryan had summarily rejected that afternoon!
For two years, Candidate Trump had loved to tell campaign crowds they'd soon become tired of winning. But as president, Trump's Republican Congress hadn't given him a single significant policy win. His only leadership policy victories came when he persuaded his pen to sign orders revoking Obama's orders. That leadership act has been exposed as leader-lite.
Now, this: Back in the Oval Office, the president who had spent two years cheerily ridiculing Schumer and Pelosi on the stump, began chummily calling his guests "Chuck and Nancy" _ for the benefit of the live mics of the real news media.
That's hardly a sign of potential presidential greatness. But it's at least a slight improvement for a president who once thought being on a first-name basis with his fellow pols meant calling his adversaries "Lyin'" and "Little" and "Crooked."
