First, it was crowd size. Then, it was health-care bill size. On Tuesday, the Trump administration continued its habit of conflating quantity with quality by releasing a list detailing President Donald Trump’s “historic accomplishments” from his first 100 days in office, a milestone he will officially reach on Saturday. The list boasts of the number of Trump’s Congressional Review Act resolutions, his executive actions, and laws he’s signed since his inauguration.
A few of these figures appear to be wrong. But what matters more is that the administration is bothering to count them in the first place.
Tuesday’s press release predicts that Trump will have signed 30 executive orders by his 100th day in office, a feat the administration says is greater than that of any other president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom it credits with signing only nine executive orders. Roosevelt actually signed 99 executive orders by June 12th, his 100th day in office.
On Twitter, historian Peter Schulman offered a plausible theory for how the press release might have gotten it wrong: Perhaps it was citing the numbers from the American Presidency Project, which appears to list only the most consequential executive orders from past presidents. Schulman also pointed out that while the press release is correct in saying that President Truman signed 25 executive orders within the first 100 days of his 1949 inauguration, Truman’s first 100 days actually took place after he took over for Roosevelt in 1945. In that year, Truman signed more than twice that many executive orders.