We’ll say this about Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president: They have taken our worst fears of what a Trump administration might try to do to America and turned them into expectations.
We have a president whose word means nothing; whose administration personifies amateur hour and whose actions are clouded by an insidious web of connections to Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies say worked to influence the election in Trump’s favor and which Congress now struggles to investigate.
Trump is right about one thing. The 100–day measure of a new president is arbitrary.
It began when Franklin Delano Roosevelt struggled to wrest the nation from the Great Depression. His spate of rapid accomplishments laid the groundwork for The New Deal that built America’s prosperous middle class, vastly diminished poverty among the elderly and set the stage for the America of the latter 20th century.
Trump seems to be aiming for a very different 21st century.
So far he has governed mainly through executive order — a tool he excoriated Barack Obama for using — and he’s learning its limits. But the orders telegraph a direction: for starters, a resolve to rid the nation of people here illegally and roll up the welcome mat, to dismantle consumer and environmental protections and — hey, what’s with all these national monuments? Do we really need them?
After all, the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Mounument that lies in Yolo, Lake, Mendocino, Napa and Solano counties is just some trees that could be better used for housing. And we’re sure if we look hard enough we’ll find something on the 330,000 acres in the area worth exploiting.
Hey, maybe we could use all that land to grow marijuana and cash in on Northern California’s infamous cash crop? Oops, well maybe not if the US. Attorney General has his way. Such is the way of Trump.
Trump’s legislation, meanwhile, has been sparse. He’s apparently better at dictating than actual leadership. His first shot at health care reform — promised for “day one” — fizzled spectacularly, and the new plan emerging this week appears even worse, if that’s possible. Approval of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, came only after the Senate GOP leadership shredded the filibuster rule. A sweeping tax reform plan burst onto the scene Wednesday, but it will take time to sort out. Predictably, it looks very good for people like Donald Trump.
Foreign relations appear to lack strategy, devalue diplomacy and epitomize the winging-it approach to governance under Trump. Winging it with nuclear weapons in play doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Top officials routinely send different signals on matters as important as Syria and NATO. And they give out little information, some of it bad: A carrier fleet supposedly steaming to North Korea was actually going in the opposite direction for about a week.
The best indication of Trump’s ultimate aims, however, are in the people he has appointed to cabinet positions, the budget he has proposed and the “America First” ideas that, at their root, seem to mean “White America First.”
Most Republican presidents try to rein in regulatory overreach. It’s a useful exercise. But Trump appears bent on unraveling all kinds of protections long supported by the GOP.
Trump’s inner circle is mostly relatives and some conspiracy theory buddies, in the manner of a tin-pot dictator. Of ethics? He seemingly has none.
Trump is the first president in decades to refuse to release his tax returns or offer any assurance that he is acting in the public interest, not his own. The evidence of these first months is that he is indeed enriching himself and his children, at the same time increasingly cloaking his administration in secrecy. His supporters apparently think that’s fine, but it is the way of oligarchies. Russia comes to mind.
A hundred days is a blip in the life of a centuries-old nation, but it feels as though something vaguely un-American is under way. This may be making America great again — but it’s not but it’s a kind of greatness we remember.
