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Our View: Let’s focus on the next 3.7 years

Much has been made the past week about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, an artificial milestone for presidential accomplishment that was created when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in the midst of the Great Depression and ramrodded the New Deal through Congress. Since then, new presidents are judged by what they accomplish during their first 100 days in office.

President Trump has had a couple of significant achievements but quite a few setbacks. That’s not surprising. He’s a president who took office with no experience as an elected public official who should have been spending his first 100 days getting oriented and figuring out how things work in Washington. But Trump set himself up for judgment by promising his supporters a long list of achievements he would accomplish in the first 100 days, from building the Wall, to tearing up NAFTA, to setting China straight on trade, to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to reforming the tax code, to bringing back jobs from overseas. He may have overestimated what he could accomplish. As Trump admitted in an interview with Reuters last week, the job is a lot more difficult than he envisioned.

So he didn’t accomplish as much as he would have liked in the first 100 days. So what? Water over the dam. Chalk it up to a learning experience. What Trump and everyone else should be focusing on is what he will do in the rest of his term. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. If he can accomplish half of what he promised for the first 100 days in the next three years, he’ll be fine.

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