Donald Trump´s 100-day gong show mostly plays by the rules
(The Star Books)

WASHINGTON—The president of the United States would not stop talking about the fraudulence of the election he had just won. It was only three days into Donald Trump’s presidency, the very beginning of what should have been his honeymoon, but he was still consumed by his inconsequential loss in November’s popular vote. In interviews, on Twitter, in private meetings, Trump kept repeating the lie that more than three million people had voted illegally. Not only that, he announced he was launching a “major investigation.� Here was a troubling breach of democratic tradition. The president was casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The president was sending the federal government on a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition because he believed nonsense from conspiracy websites. And then the whole thing disappeared. No investigation ever materialized. The president got distracted by other grievances. That was that.If there is a perfect metaphor for Trump’s first 100 days, it is the vanishing saga of the imaginary illegal voters. Sound and fury, revealing impulsiveness and dishonesty and a tenuous connection with reality, resulting in a media storm and nothing else.The story of Trump’s gong show of a young administration is a tale of broken norms of presidential behaviour. But it is also, just as importantly, about substantive norms prevailing. All the chaos has distracted from a whole lot of continuity.Read more: Trump at 100 days: The biggest, funniest and weirdest moments so farHere’s everything important that’s happened in Trump’s first 100 days‘Trump has accomplished more in his 100 days than any other President since Franklin Roosevelt,’ White House says, falselyDonald Trump said 16 false things in that bizarre Oval Office interview with the Associated PressThe man who promised that transformative change would be “so easy� has either failed in his attemp ...