Donald Trump’s first hundred hours have been an even bigger dumpster fire than we were expecting
Last night Donald Trump declared that his first few days in office were “THE MOST HISTORIC 100 HOURS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.” Even getting past the absurdity of the phrase “the most historic in history,” this sentence from Trump is just sort of laughable. He promised to bring immediate (evil) change to America, and he’s certainly spend these first days trying to do evil. But if anything this week has demonstrated just how much difficulty he’s going to have in doing anything.
The Trump regime promised immediate massive raids in Chicago against immigrants. But thus far that’s only consisted of Trump sending ICE agents to one Chicago school, where they were turned away. Evil? Yes. Effective? No.
Trump has managed to round up a few immigrants, and put them on a plane to Mexico. But Mexico refused to allow the plane to land. So much for the notion that Trump’s rhetoric was going to prompt the rest of the western hemisphere to bow down to Trump. In fact Trump’s threatening rhetoric toward places like Canada and Greenland has only really succeeded in getting those places to laugh at him.
Meanwhile Trump is busy driving his own approval rating down by doing unpopular things like pardoning January 6th terrorists. If this was supposed to make him look strong and scary, it’s only managed to make him look deranged and stupid and unserious. Whatever the people outside Trump’s base thought they were going to get by voting for this guy, none of it’s happening.
Consumer prices have gone up not down, and people are starting to notice. The war in Ukraine didn’t magically end in 24 hours like Trump promised. Trump’s one big press conference was an incoherent dud. Trump’s one big interview consisted of Hannity trying to get him to talk about the economy while he yelled at Hannity. Meanwhile Trump is obsessively babbling about windmills, while still not seeming to know anything about them. It’s objectively embarrassing.
This week has been a reminder that for all the other traits that define Donald Trump, from corruption to extremism to psychopathy to soullessness to cruelty, the one trait that overwhelmingly defines him is massive incompetence. We saw for four years that he simply didn’t know how to get done most of the evil things that he was trying to do. This time around he’s far less cognitively able and he’s surrounded by bigger idiots than ever.
This is not going to be an enjoyable battle. This is going to be four years of ugliness. But this week has shown us that it’s also going to be a battle that’s winnable on at least some fronts or even many fronts, because Trump and his people are indeed idiots. This has been an even bigger dumpster fire than we were expecting, but the dumpster fire is being defined by ineptitude. Let’s make sure we use it against him.
