Trump’s 100 days: Foreign Policy and Security Implications

‘I think the 100 days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful’, Trump (Citation2017) declared in an April 2017 interview. Yet candidate Trump (Citation2016) had also issued a ‘100 day action plan to Make America Great Again’. The first ‘100 days’ of an administration has been a barometer for a president’s credibility in the White House since President Franklin Roosevelt (Keith Citation2017). It is an effort to systematise events and behaviours. However, Trump’s 100 days poses a challenge. The President appears to defy systematisation: he rejects his own 100-day measurement, albeit as a way of avoiding criticism and downplaying expectation (Berenson Citation2017); he is unwilling to operate within predefined structures and look beyond the short-term; and his presidency lacks doctrine. As one of our contributors argues, in the haste to fit the Trump Presidency within existing frameworks, analysts risk identifying some deeper rationale or coherent motivation that simply does not exist. A recurrent theme of this Intervention issue is one of unpredictability and unexpected U-turns.

Critical Studies on Security, 5(2)