Trump at 100 days

Donald Trump has no significant legislative accomplishments.  After insisting that healthcare reform would be easy and lying about having a nearly-complete plan on several occasions, he crashed and burned on that.  Repeal-and-replace is dead, and Obamacare is probably here to stay.  Trump's main executive order (what I have repeatedly called "muslim redlining") has been twice blocked by the courts.  His "Mexico will pay for the wall" promise is an international joke, and Congress forced him to back down from a demand for appropriations for taxpayer funding rather than face a government shutdown.  Trump's approval ratings are, by far, the lowest of any president at this stage with no realistic hope of improvement.  The latest economic figures have put a big, old question mark on claims of a "Trump bump" in the economy.  North Korea is... unimpressed with Trump's supposed toughness, and while their technological ineptitude prevents their missile tests from succeeding, they keep trying, and neither Assad nor any other psycho around the world seems to be cowering in the face of Trump's toughness.  All of his "deal-making" to keep jobs in the US are empty gimmicks, when examined closely.

If you look at the lists that Trump supports have compiled for his "accomplishments" in his first 100 days, the only thing that even remotely warrants consideration is that he now has a nominee on the Supreme Court, and he deservers zero credit for that.  Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court because of Mitch McConnell, not Donald Trump.  Mitch McConnell blockaded the Supreme Court from any Obama nomination after Scalia died, nearly a year before the election.  It was an unprecedented move, and a very risky gambit.  It happened to pay off because Trump won, and even then, it was only with assistance from people like James Comey.  At that point, Trump was handed a list of judges, pre-approved by the Federalist Society and pre-vetted.  All he had to do was pick a name with no wrong choices as far as conservative activists were concerned.  If you go to the best restaurant in the world and have a great dinner, you don't get to brag about what a great choice you made when you picked your meal.  You praise the chef.  Well, unless you are Donald Trump, in which case you aren't capable of doing anything except bragging.  Regardless, whatever one thinks of Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump deserves zero credit for the "success" of putting him on the Supreme Court, because if you like him, you would be just as happy with any other name on the list that Trump was handed by his handlers, all of whom would have been confirmed by now, thanks to Mitch McConnell.  Give credit to the chef, not the diner who picked the meal from a menu with no wrong choices.

And of course, this doesn't even get into Flynn, Russia, etc.

All of this is to say that Trump's first 100 days are, by any objective standard, lousy.  It is no wonder that he skipped the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  Of course, he would skip anyway.  The point is a roast, and he has skin so thin that quantum physicists think of those who believe in it as philosophers rather than physicists.*  The last time he attended one of these things, he sat seething because he couldn't take the fact that Obama was joking about him during that birther bullshit.  Of course he wasn't going to attend, particularly as such a failure.  He also can't be funny.  He bombed at the Al Smith dinner last year!

However.

The 100 day marker is nonsense.  We have a base-10 number system.  We also once had this dude we call FDR.  Not the Seinfeld dude (I can't link to it because I don't want to give money to Bannon).  The President.  The one who expanded the federal government, eventually joined WWII, strategically refused to confront segregation, interred Americans of Japanese descent (oh, you liberals don't like remembering those, do you?), etc.  But, he got a LOT done in his first 100 days.  So much that it kind of isn't fair to compare anyone to him.  But, we do anyway.

Will Trump get stuff done eventually?  Tax cuts will be passed.  Beyond that, uh...

Trump, though, promised a lot, and promised it immediately.  Why?  Because he's an arrogant moron.

My current bedside reading: CS Friedman's In Conquest Born.  It isn't her best, not by a longshot, but the dude is a parody of a Braxana, who are already themselves pretty one-dimensional.



*Get it?  String theory?  Huh?!  Huh?!  Too obscure?

Subscribe to receive free email updates: