What a whirlwind the past 99 days have been in Washington. A new president took office with no foreign policy or elective-office experience and a shockingly minimal understanding of basic civics, much less how to run the world's most powerful office. Donald Trump apparently thought he could wing it.

His bombastic, overblown rhetoric blew up in his face time and time again, with embarrassing results. Outlandish campaign promises — to build a border wall, repeal Obamacare, renegotiate the NAFTA free-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, label China a currency manipulator and implement "extreme vetting" of immigrants — withered as the new president learned that it's a lot easier to talk and tweet about governing than it is to actually govern.

According to Politifact, Trump promised to complete 103 agenda items during his first 100 days in office. Of those, he has completed six — all aided by his executive-decree powers. When his initiatives required approval by Congress or the courts, he repeatedly hit a brick wall.

Our fear on Inauguration Day was that GOP majorities in Congress would clear the path for Trump to advance many of his most outlandish proposals. Instead, the system of checks and balances has worked as the Founders designed it, including the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Honeymoons, especially when the president's party controls both houses of Congress, are a time to get serious work done. But Trump has failed even to unite his fellow Republicans behind him. He miscalculated the persuasiveness of blustery rhetoric and offensive Twitter blasts. Congress clearly was unmoved, and the American people have given him the lowest first-quarter approval ratings of any modern president — by a 14-point margin, according to Gallup.

Trump has tried to blame everyone else for his own failures. It was the news media's fault. Or President Barack Obama. Incompetent judges. Democrats in Congress. The generals. Rarely, if ever, has he acknowledged personal failures as president. His ego won't allow it.

When his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after only 24 days in the job, the president lashed out at his critics, suggesting some grand conspiracy was afoot to undermine his authority.

Flynn lied. In all likelihood, he broke the law by failing to list his lobbying work on behalf of the Turkish government and payments from a propaganda website linked to Russia's government. Trump erred by rushing Flynn's appointment without fully vetting him.

The president's bold actions to confront dictators in Syria and North Korea may have caused those leaders to rethink their deployment of weapons of mass destruction. But Trump's bluff about deploying an "armada" to the Korean peninsula badly undermined his credibility when it was confirmed that the carrier was heading away from, not toward, the peninsula.

The military responses have helped distract public attention from ongoing FBI and congressional probes into his administration's alleged links to Russia and Moscow's attempts to influence the Nov. 8 presidential election. But there's no question Trump's momentum on other major agenda items has been negatively affected by the Russia probes.

His health care and tax-reform agendas so far have gone nowhere. The border wall remains a fantasy. Instead of draining the Washington swamp, he has restocked it with a new host of appointees with obvious conflicts of interest.

Capitol Hill Republicans were chomping at the bit to replace Obamacare, but they were the ones who defeated Trump's badly planned first attempt to overturn it.

Trump's credibility also has sagged amid scrutiny over the multiple conflicts of interest posed by his ongoing family business operations. And what kind of image does Trump think he projects to the millions of underpaid, struggling Americans who see him, at great public expense, spending a third of his time jetting to and from his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida?

Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time obsessing over superlatives — the worst, the greatest, the best, the biggest — even to the point where he felt compelled to describe the dessert he served to Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago as "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you've ever seen." (This as Trump was launching cruise missiles to attack Syria.) The United States was unleashing an act of war on a sovereign nation, and Trump wanted to impress us with cake?

Against a backdrop of minimal accomplishments, Trump sought last week to dismiss assessments of his first 100 days as "ridiculous." Yet his aides got on the phone to this editorial board and others in what seemed a desperate attempt to tout anything they could as a major milestone.

They cited the fact that he has signed the most (another superlative) executive actions of any president. But executive actions are what presidents do when they cannot mobilize Congress behind them.

Trump has only himself to blame for his dismal results. Americans don't want a tweeter-in-chief who sets policy based on whatever report he's just watched on Fox News. They don't want a glitter-and-pizzazz showman. They want a leader.

It's time for Trump to dump the Twitter account, stop the weekend Mar-a-Lago visits and focus on the job he was elected to do.

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