ANALYSIS: Trump 6 months in - the great fixer needs fixing

— -- Donald Trump is governing as he campaigned -– defiantly, angrily, and not necessarily productively.

Six months into his term in office, President Trump has succeeded in disrupting the power structures that have long governed Washington. He has delivered on his broad mandate to shake up the national political landscape, while establishing a wild new normal of constant movement and noise generated out of the White House.

The problem comes that for all the president’s exertions and proclamations, a power vacuum now defines Trump’s Washington. The collapse of his signature legislative promise –- to repeal and replace Obamacare –- underscores his inability to deliver on the substance of his agenda, with a conservative revolt helping doom Trump’s push.

The president has seemed alternately determined and oblivious in the face of the fact that he will have zero major legislative accomplishments to boast of from his first half-year in office –- historically, the most productive portion of a president’s term.

With his health care push stalled, he is vacillating publicly between competing strategies -– repeal and replace, repeal and delay, or let it all collapse. He is calling for Congress to stay in session through the summer and vaguely threatening fellow Republicans, even while wiping his hands of the consequences of inaction.

“I’m not going to own it,” the president declared this week of the fallout of the failure to either repeal or try to fix Obamacare.

Rewinding a year unearths another memorable quote, one that serves as a useful way to measure his presidency’s success: “I alone can fix it,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention.

The great promise of Trump was his outsider credentials. He was the consummate dealmaker, beholden to no special interests, who would channel the frustrations of forgotten Americans and deliver achievements based on his business acumen and force of personality.

But the dealmaker has failed to make deals, and the salesman has so far been unable to sell. The president has wrapped himself in an insular world of cable television and self-aggrandizing tweets that have so far failed to advance any major portions of his agenda.

Trump has trampled the credibility of the presidency with streams of half-truths and utter falsehoods that have no parallel in the office he holds. Some are harmless and ultimately meaningless. Others have been malicious, such as his baseless claim that only illegal ballots cost him the popular vote, or that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

He’s treaded lightly through areas of policy, pronouncing an eagerness to sign a bill but no great enthusiasm over what is actually in it. His allies on Capitol Hill don’t know what to make of some of his forays into policy, but they are learning not to take his words to the bank.

A fight he chose on his own threatens to subsume his presidency. His firing of FBI Director James Comey guaranteed that a Russia investigation that could have simmered in the background will flare up intermittently for the foreseeable future. The president, in turn, has chosen to attack the special counsel whose charge could easily expand into obstruction of justice.

That’s been the classic Trump response - to attack when under pressure, regardless of party or potential political effect. That has also drawn him inward, as he protects his White House and his family, wars with a critical press corps, and caters heavily to a political base that has stayed solidly on his side.

Trump’s approval rating stands lower than any president at the six-month mark in the modern history of polling, going back seven decades. But the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll has his approval at 82 percent among Republicans.

A solid quarter of the country thinks he’s been doing a better job than most presidents who preceded him, and that world leadership has gotten stronger on his watch. Similar margins approve of his use of Twitter, and even of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians to discuss campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump continues to speak to them. But the keys to governing success reside beyond that portion of the country – among voters and lawmakers who continue to see flaws in the commander-in-chief.

Trump allies among establishment Republicans have developed a coping mechanism that gets repeated often: focus on what he does, and not what he says or tweets. It’s almost become cliché for them to answer questions about his presidency with a response that includes the fact that he named Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court without flaw or delay.

But that does not a presidency make. Trump said recently that he would be “very angry” if his health care push falls short, knowing that it marks his best shot at a major victory.

Perhaps he can defy the odds again. But the Trump presidency for now remains more about Trump than it does about governing.