We’ve finally turned the corner on this guy
If you want to know how the tide is turning, when you type “how many days since” into Google, “how many days since January 20th 2025” comes up as a suggestion. That’s because of the sheer number of people who have been looking up precisely how long ago Donald Trump took office and began wrecking the economy and the country. That many people have had enough of him already. For the record, it’s been 104 days. Why does that matter?
Once a US President takes office, he has a window of opportunity. The media takes the election result as a sign that they’re supposed to go soft for awhile on the new President who was just chosen by the people. And plenty of people out there, who don’t really understand or care about politics and just want things to go well, will also give any new President a period of benefit of the doubt.
But once a hundred days comes and goes, the media feels like it can use that nice round number to safely shift the narrative to “Okay, this guy is not such a newly elected President anymore, what’s he gotten done since taking office?” Once the media takes that sharp shift in tone, the people in the middle tend to do the same.
Case in point: Trump has been making a mess of the economy, the rule of law, and world relations since literally day one. But you’ll notice that the media didn’t really start going hard at Trump, and (accurately) portraying him as a failure in office, until he was approaching the hundred day mark. At this point it’s no holds barred. Everyone but Fox News is (again accurately) going all negative on Trump all the time, and even Fox seems to be trying to insulate itself a bit from Trump’s unpopularity.
But what does this really mean? Okay, so Trump is unpopular. He’s still the President of the United States until 2029 (I can’t believe I just had to type that sentence). It’s not like there is a particular level of unpopularity at which the President falls through a trap door. Some nations do have a system that pretty much works that way, but we don’t.
What we do have is an unofficial system where the more unpopular the President becomes, the less power and leverage he wields. If for instance Trump were going to try to overthrow the Supreme Court, he’d need most of the general public to willing to go along with it. But given his historically low and dropping approval rating, Trump would never find that support. He still has his base of 25 million people, but they’ve always been a loud minority. But he’s starting to lose the other 50 million people who held their nose and stupidly voted for him. And that matters, because no one ever wields any real political power with just the support of their base.
This is also the time when members of the House and Senate start looking at the 2026 election. Sure, it’s a year and a half off, but that’s about how long House and Senate campaigns last these days. For all the supportive things (and some unsupportive things) that House and Senate Republicans are saying about Trump in public, they’re going out of their minds with frustration and panic about how unpopular Trump is becoming. They care far more about keeping their own seats and power than they do about what happens to a feeble and unpopular Trump. So if they have to start pushing him around in private, or even incrementally in public, they’ll do what they have to do in order to give themselves a shot in 2026.
Meanwhile we – you, me, Palmer Report, the larger Resistance – are still here doing what we’ve been doing since the day Trump took office. It’s what we’ve been doing ever since this monster entered the political fray in 2015. We’ve been pushing back against his every corrupt move, we’ve been organizing and mobilizing against him, and we’ve been pressuring the media to cover him as negatively as he deserves. But now that the first hundred days have passed, and Trump has fared poorly enough to start getting savaged by all sides, I truly believe we’re starting to turn the corner on this guy. The first hundred days are always the hardest. Now he’s stuck in the mud – and if nothing else we know by now how to exploit this guy’s many vulnerabilities.
