First impressions count, and the first 100 days are an indicator of success or failure in a president’s crucial first year in office. In his contract with America, candidate Trump told voters that he would “restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities and honesty to our government”. These words, like much Mr. Trump, has said, have proved worthless.
After 100 days of sound and fury in Washington, words such as unprecedented and normal have been drained of meaning. But one thing has remained constant during Donald Trump’s presidency: having lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, he took office with the lowest approval rating of any incoming president; he now has the lowest approval rating of any president at the 100-day mark. Although polls suggest his base remains loyal with 96% of his voters saying that they would do it again. I do not know if we should consider this sad, worrying or both.
From his first day as president, on January 20, when he claimed that he had had the most popular inauguration in American history, Trump accustomed his fellow citizens and the world to not take his words or his spokesman, Sean Spicer, seriously. As presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway explained at the beginning of the term, Trump and his spokesman do not lie when they offer data or advocate for things that can not be verified, but instead, hold “alternative facts” such as when he stated in an Associated Press interview “I ’ve done a lot. I’ve done more than any other president in the first 100 days.”
Donald Trump has only achieved one unquestionable “success” in his first hundred days as president: appoint a conservative judge for the Supreme Court. Everything else has been failures, defaults, scandals, contradictions and mere declarations of intention.
“I think nobody knows the system better than I do,” Donald Trump said in July last year in accepting the Republican Party nomination. To be fair he also said he was the best at a lot of other things, one must be true!
Just days after more than a million women marched in major US cities to repudiate his assumption, Trump signed a decree, surrounded only by men, to de-finance any international organization that advises or supports abortion. He authorized the construction of pipelines that had been stopped by the previous government by the claims of the main environmental groups of the country, approved to raise a wall along the entire southern border with Mexico, cut the federal funds to so-called Sanctuary cities that act as safe areas that do not deliver information on undocumented immigrants and undid Obama’s environmental policy with a single stroke.
He put Betsy DeVos, a millionaire who is a strong advocate for religious and private education, as Education Secretary. In the Energy Department, he named a climate change denier as Energy Secretary. His Attorney general is someone accused of sympathizing with white supremacist groups and the list goes on and on.
Nevertheless, the actions he said he would accomplish but failed to do so are also important. The Judicial Power held up Trump’s Travel ban and the American Healthcare Act collapsed in Congress, which also failed to approve funding for the wall with Mexico.
Only 1362 Days Till America Is Great Again!
