Chaos crowns Trump's first month: Our view

Has it only been one month? With all that has transpired since Jan. 20, when President Trump took office, it seems like far longer.

In this short span, the new president has stumbled from one self-inflicted mess to another. The slapdash travel ban he instituted one week into his presidency has been exposed as both arbitrary and harmful to America’s national security interests. And the forced resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, amid reports of numerous contacts between Trump aides and Russian intelligence agents, has reignited concerns about the sanctity of last year’s election.

Other troubling developments include: a Cabinet nominee who withdrew before the Republican-controlled Senate could reject him; strained relations with Australia and Mexico, two reliable allies; a flawed military raid in Yemen; a torrent of leaks driven by high-level infighting; blatant conflicts of interest involving the first family; and a top general openly talking of the “unbelievable turmoil” in government.

In the midst of all this, the president insists with a straight face that his administration is "running like a fine-tuned machine" and focuses mostly on what he has always focused on: himself. He has obsessed about inaugural crowd sizes and barely existent voter fraud, picked infantile fights with critics, attempted to undermine the judiciary and the news media, and even disparaged a department store that discontinued his daughter’s line of fashion.

None of this is surprising to people who expected President Trump to be the same as candidate Trump. But many of those who believed that he'd pivot to a more presidential demeanor if elected have to be dismayed by the spectacle.

Rep. Collins: President delivers on promises

At last week's freewheeling progress report and news conference, Trump repeated demonstrable falsehoods about the size of his election victory and got into odd back-and-forths with reporters over facts, lies, TV ratings and his preference for Fox & Friends as a morning news show. Such a performance might have been vintage Trump and played well to his core supporters, but it erodes the moral authority he will need to sustain his presidency for the long term, particularly in times of external crisis.

To be sure, some things about Trump’s first month were not a disaster:

• He made the right calls on approving the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline and imposing tougher lobbying restrictions.
• Some of his Cabinet selections, notably James Mattis at Defense and David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs, are commendable. 
• And, if one can put aside how Trump came to have a Supreme Court opening in the first place (by the Senate's obstructionism of President Obama's highly qualified nominee), his court pick — appellate Judge Neil Gorsuch — has admirable legal qualifications and deserves a fair hearing. 

But to focus on these things is to set an incredibly low bar. Voters expect basic competence. What they have seen is a president — the first to come into the position with zero government or military experience — who is easily distracted and surrounds himself with similarly unseasoned advisers.

Jeb Bush, during the course of his spectacularly unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination, made a prescient prediction about Trump: "Donald is ... a chaos candidate, and he'd be a chaos president." The nation and the world can't endure too many more chaotic months like the last one.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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