Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by Michael Brendan Doherty, who is now senior writer at the National Review, and we're going to

be discussing Trump's first 100 days. Michael, this week we've seen lots of talk about Trump's

100 days. This has become quite an important benchmark for presidents now. And the impression we've

got on this side of the pond, and of course we're possibly biased by a media that

doesn't like him, is that it has been, even for people who vaguely wanted Trump to do well,

not the real Trumpist, but the people who want Trump to do well, it's been a bit of a catastrophe

so far, the Trump presidency. Is that a fair assessment? I would say it's close. It's close to a fair assessment.

I mean, you had the one major legislative push was healthcare and that completely failed.

And not only did it completely fail, but it failed before it even got resistance from Democrats.

It failed among Republicans.

You know, the Democrats haven't even really played much of a role in Trump's first hundred days.

I mean, the only thing you could say that Democrats have done is that Barack Obama's appointments to federal courts over the past eight years.

Some of them have stymied some of Trump's executive orders like the travel ban.

Yes.

And that would be the other big disaster of the first 100 days was that clearly Trump and

his advisors thought that they could put the political class on the back foot with a series

of executive orders over a couple of weeks. And they seemed not to have understood the level

of resistance to the travel ban or the level of hysteria that could be generated about it.

And the effectiveness of hysteria that could be generated about it and the effectiveness of state attorney

generals and other judicial figures in just putting a halt to it.

...