Trump’s first 100 days

Since November, and the election of Donald Trump, here’s the scenario that’s kept me up at night: that the Trump administration, and the Trump era in American life, would be more or less (or at least compared to expectations) okay for me and people like me.

That it would be okay, more or less, for white people.

It’s a cliché at this point: Donald Trump constantly misleads the public.

But just how often does he do this? A new analysis from the Washington Post tries to put a number on Trump’s false and misleading claims. It concludes:

“I can’t wait for the 100-day shit to be over,” an exhausted senior administration official told Politico. Well, it’s over now, and nothing is on fire — that’s worth some celebration, at least. Donald Trump’s madcap milestone week proved to be his presidency in miniature: packed with controversy and aggravation and effort and fear, but ultimately amounting to little.

Trump said he would pull out of NAFTA, but after being talked down by aides and foreign leaders, didn’t. He tried to pass his health care bill — which had been amended to make it easier for insurers to discriminate against the sick — but failed. He demanded a tax reform plan only to learn his staff didn’t yet have one, so he made them release one anyway, with ridiculous results. He saw a cruel immigration order stopped by the courts, and responded by musing publicly about breaking up a different court. (He appears to have gotten confused.) Even the routine procession of PR emails and boasts turned into farce, as when Trump’s staff miscounted the number of executive orders FDR signed during his first 100 days, and claimed Trump had signed more. (He hasn’t, not even close.)

At first glance, Trump voters and Clinton voters appear sharply divided on how they view Trump’s handling of the presidency so far.

Ninety-five percent of the people who voted for Donald Trump approve of his performance, according to a Vox-SurveyMonkey poll of more than 1,000 Americans conducted in early April. Among Clinton voters, it couldn’t be more different — 93 percent disapprove of his performance.

President Donald Trump is barreling into his 100th day in office, and the federal government remains a bare-bones operation.

There are 549 key positions in Trump’s administration that require Senate confirmation. Trump has yet to nominate anyone to 468 of them.

President Donald Trump wants to take America back to the 1980s and ’90s.

At least, that’s what Trump and his administration have indicated through their rhetoric and policy proposals regarding crime. Over the first 100 days of the new presidency, Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have accomplished little on specific criminal justice policy. But they have spent a lot of time warning about high crime — even though crime is actually near historic lows in America — and pushing the kind of “tough on crime” and “war on drugs” policies that lawmakers enacted in response to the crime waves and drug epidemics of the 1960s through 1990s.

It became clear around 11 am that the Helena Capitol building was far too small for all the demonstrators who showed up.

Every balcony in the rotunda was full. People spilled out of the room and into the hallways. When we chanted, the building shook.

A major premise of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was that as a successful businessman, he would be “greedy” on behalf of America. But instead, his CEO mindset has generated one of the least productive first 100 days of a presidency in modern American history.

On his march to the White House, Trump frequently touted his prowess as a formidable dealmaker and efficient businessman as what was needed to turn around a stagnating nation. “Under budget and ahead of schedule. So important. We don’t hear those words so often, but you will,” Trump pledged at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hotel in Washington in October. “Today is a metaphor for what we can accomplish for this country.” His voters were thrilled by the idea.

When Donald Trump called the 100 days mark for judging a presidency a “ridiculous standard,” he was echoing what historians have said for years. If anything, he could have gone further. The habit of weighing a president’s success 100 days in is a blight on the modern presidency, as pointless as it is impossible to uproot.

Journalists will never dump the convention, because it’s such an easy hook. Politicians will never dump it, because in the middle of a campaign it’s too tempting to reel off a wish list for their first days in the White House.

As President Donald Trump has tried to make his mark in his first 100 days of office, late-night TV hosts have scrambled to both decode and send up a man they once treated as nothing more than a tired toupee joke. Every weeknight, these men and one woman continue to spit punchlines and/or acid in the face of the new administration. Some have risen to the occasion with barbs blazing; others have taken a step back.

All of them, however, have found themselves grappling with the fact that we’re living in an era of unprecedented political polarization — and have realized that trying to find the comedy in increasingly hyperbolic-sounding news headlines can be a serious challenge.

Donald Trump was elected, in part, because he promised to shake things up. In October, he even posted a “100-day Plan to Make America Great Again.“ The list included, among other things, repealing and replacing Obamacare and cleaning up corruption in Washington.

So, just a few days shy of the 100-day mark, what can we say? Was Trump the agent of change he vowed to be? The simple answer is no. With the exception of appointing a Supreme Court justice and opting out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump has failed to deliver on most of his promises.