Reporter’s Notebook: Inside the White House’s sprint to the 100-day finish line

Gary Blakeley/iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — President Trump may have called the 100-day point of his presidency a “ridiculous marker,” but on the ground this past week the White House has been engaged in an all-hands-on-deck, all-out sprint hoping to put last-minute wins on the board.

On Wednesday, the White House dispatched the Treasury secretary, the president’s chief economic adviser, the commerce secretary, a top national security official and the VA secretary for in-person briefings, including a conference call with a top official in the Department of Education.

The breakneck pace of back-to-back-to-back briefings left some reporters running in and out of all of them to chase down the news of the day. Whether it involved the president popping by the North Korea briefing as a senior national security adviser briefed on the situation simultaneously, or when Sen. Chris Coons found himself ambushed by reporters on the North Lawn as more than 90 of his fellow senators began loading onto rented coach buses back to Capitol Hill.

In addition to that, in an arrangement that can only be described as Cabinet speed dating, several executive branch officials and senior staff were tasked with doing multiple radio and TV interviews, trying to fan the administration’s message across the country. The effort included octogenarian Wilbur Ross moving from chair to chair for media sit-downs in the makeshift radio row in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Observing the roll-out of Wednesday’s tax plan, it appeared to be the result of a staff caught off-guard by the president’s impromptu promise last week to deliver on a signature campaign promise. The one-page, multiple-font, double-spaced outline included far less detail than even the tax plan the president rolled out as a candidate.

The president, on the other hand, by all appearances coasted through the week with a relaxed demeanor. He has invited reporters into the Oval Office for private interviews, signed executive orders where he joked that he didn’t have time to read the whole text, and made off-campus visits to the Treasury Department, the Interior Department and today to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Yesterday he spent the late afternoon on the phone with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister after Politico quoted one of his “top aides” saying he was preparing to sign an executive order withdrawing from NAFTA, and then bragged about his negotiations Thursday morning on Twitter.

The drama around the prospect of the government shutting down or the potential for a revived health care bill has been mostly kept outside the confines of the White House. Meanwhile Trump is heading for a weekend in one of his favorite settings: a campaign-style rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the fourth of his presidency.

The thought of the president “among the people” in a key state that delivered his election win as DC’s press dons black ties and gowns in the Washington Hilton has every aide grinning. For a president with few substantive policy wins on his watch, they couldn’t have drawn out better optics for the 100th day in a TV script.

Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.

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