As the first 100 days of Trump’s circus come to a close, all we can hope is that there won’t be another 100 days like these ever again. Trump approved a Yemen attack operation that killed one navy soldier and ten Yemeni civilians, and launched the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS, that supposedly killed 96 militants with no civilian casualties. No evidence exists for either figure. Trump also fired a National Security Advisor working with Russia, touted a “6 million” inauguration crowd and other blatant lies, and turned politics into the Real Senators of Washington. Every day, Sean Spicer has to indignantly defend and stammer his way through a barrage of questions based on what Trump tweeted at three in the morning the previous night.
Trump’s agenda comprised of repealing and replacing the ACA (Obamacare), building a border wall that Mexico would pay for, imposing a travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, and 300 other points that all Make America Great Again. He was going to create the biggest and greatest tax reforms we had ever seen; we were going to pay such a little amount in taxes that we were going to grow bored of all the extra money in our pockets. Well…that seems only true for the millionaires and billionaires. I guess the best thing about the tax reform plan is that anybody can read a one page double-spaced paper which, ironically, was created by the smartest people on Wall Street. But I digress. Of the hundreds of promises, his greatest accomplishments were filling the the Supreme Court vacancy with Judge Neil Gorsuch, completely gutting the State Department and EPA, and getting record-high ratings on C-Span.
Most people ask why the first 100 days of a presidency are so important. Franklin Roosevelt set the bar when America was in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933. FDR rolled out the New Deal and in the end passed 15 new pieces of legislation–a legislative achievement that has not been beaten and a completely unrealistic goal to achieve by any other, yet all since have taken the challenge. In any case the first 100 days is when presidents should at least start start to get public and congressional approval for their big plans and it is a good prelude to the success of an administration. None of Trump’s biggest and greatest legislative promises have passed: repealing and replacing Obamacare was stopped before ever coming to a vote in Congress and the Muslim travel bans were stomped by federal court judges. Trump has signed 30 executive orders, a new record for the first 100 days.
With a president that seems to have little to no regard for the environment or the American people, including his own red-state supporters, what can we positively say about Trump’s first 100 days? The silver lining seems to be Americans coalescing to fight Trump’s oppressive administration in a constitutional way. Exercising our First Amendment’s freedom of assembly, there has been a rally for women’s rights around the world, in Congressional town hall meetings, and a March for Science, just to name a few. All we can do during these dark times is be active, informed and vigilant Americans, and prepare for 2018, or impeachment, whichever comes first.
Image from whitehouse.gov