Crybaby-In-Chief: 99 Days of Trumpism
I thought we’d do something a little different for Day 99; let’s hear the news from The President of the United States himself.
99 days. 99 days of Trumpism.
Perhaps it was a pipe dream to assume there would be some kind of lesson as the country approached this moment, but I confess I do find myself disappointed at the lack of consensus.
The latest Times/Siena poll has his approval at 42% and disapproval at 45%, while a Fox News poll from a few days earlier has his approval at 44% and disapproval at 55%. On the one hand, it’s the lowest approval rating of any president at the 100-day mark, at least in my lifetime; on the other hand, it’s surprising to see that so many voters are still on board with his performance, even after everything we’ve seen.
Signs of hope (though more rare than we care to admit) remain: The title of today's episode of The Daily podcast is “Americans to Trump: You've Gone Too Far,” where they highlight just how troublesome the polling numbers are for the Republican party. Along those same lines, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, discussed on his Substack last week how there are many conservatives condemning the administration’s moves as well. Then, you’ve got Tesla’s sales down 71%... the dissent is audible, that’s for sure, and it’s not limited to liberals and progressives.
I thought we’d do something a little different for Day 99; let’s hear the news from The President of the United States himself. I’ve gathered President Trump’s posts from today on Truth Social and I’ll react to them below.
Full disclosure: I chose the five that I found most interesting, because all his posts won’t fit. I skipped over multiple endorsements, something about a country singer, something about the NFL, and something about a high school mascot which I have refused to engage with. Bigger fish and all…
Please feel free to read the Presidential Action for yourself, but it might be a moot point; the President has expressed his wish to abolish ICE before, and he says himself they will “work hard to fix a terribly broken System” before following with “and return power to State Emergency Managers” …It kinda feels like they’ve all but confirmed what the plan is.
For the record, I’m not actually against a secure border, I just think the administration (at large, but him in particular) has made an art form out of taking credit for that which they did not achieve. I’ll let PBS handle the fact-checking portion of this argument, but I want to point out the SICK IRONY of this post by drawing your attention to the one below ↓
It’s not the first time he’s used that phrase, an artificially drawn line, but I confess it seems to short-circuit my brain for a moment whenever he says it: that the President official border policy is “military/wall” when looking south and “we don't need a border” when looking north?
That’s the most tragic part of this whole era of our country; he never really gave a damn about America beyond what it could do for him. He WON. He won despite all the odds, got out of 91 charges, survived an assassination attempt, retook office and then started remaking THE WORLD… and He’s. Still. Talking. About. Himself. It will never, ever stop.
Does it make me an insane libtard to point out that Stalin used this type of speech during his reign of terror?
Was it insane of Al Gore to point out that, even though Hitler’s Third Reich WAS truly and uniquely evil, they came to power in the first place by insisting on their distorted version of reality, as Donald Trump and his administration do every day?
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell, believes that Gore and I are both crazy, because Mussolini is more in line with Donald Trump’s style; truthfully, we might all be correct because Trumpism seems to borrow freely from all who came before, with their own unique blend of Americana… but who’s correct feels unimportant when we all agree he resembles terrible men, and there comes a point where the question needs to become “Why the f*** does The 47th Administration resemble all those regimes more than the 46 U.S. presidential administrations that came before it?” Even Trump 1.0 wasn’t like this.
3 New Executive Orders
The Trump Administration appears to love a manic Monday, because they were busy today:
New EO instructing AG and HHS to make a list of sanctuary cities to be targeted for lawsuits and withholding of funds
New EO in which I will quote New York Times so as to avoid talking too much shit: “...Order instructs the Trump administration to provide legal resources to police officers accused of wrongdoing; review and attempt to modify existing restraints on law enforcement, such as federal consent decrees; provide military equipment to local law enforcement; and use enforcement measures against local officials who ‘unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties.’”
New EO that requires commercial truck drivers in the United States to be proficient in English. I’m not kidding; this, folks, seems to fit the definition of xenophobia fairly well: “fear or hostility toward foreigners or non-English speakers.” Beyond the discrimination, it’s also just economically self-defeating. Reporting in October 2024, Colin Campbell of Trucking Dive notes “The industry was short 60,000 drivers or less last year, 78,000 two years ago, and a record 81,258 in 2021, the American Trucking Association estimated.” Do we really want to stop that downward trend?
As the day comes to a close, reporters are starting to unpack the turmoil that appears to be going on inside the Justice Department; the headline from NYT reads “Alarm over changes at the Justice Departments’ civil rights office prompted an ‘exodus’”, but I haven’t read the whole story myself, yet, so I’ll withhold comment for the moment.
I’ll also shut up about every author of the National Climate Assessment being dismissed from their duties today, which begs the question if we’ll have an NCA at all in the future (it’s required by Congress, nbd).
Tomorrow is Day 100; the President has a rally planned (what they’re rallying for, I have no idea), but I’ll be looking for the deep dives and analyses that are sure to come from great reporters. I’ll also be collecting quotes as best I can.
There are grade-schoolers who do consistently superior work.