Halfway through Donald Trump’s ugly first 100 days, he’s losing and The Resistance is winning
Check the history books and you’ll find that every modern president has accomplished the majority of what he’s ever going to accomplish within his first hundred days. After that the benefit of the doubt from undecideds fades and things bog down, and the rest of the term is an incremental slog. Now that Donald Trump is halfway through his own first hundred days, two things are clear: he’s losing. And while it may not feel like it to those who oppose him, the Resistance is winning this ugly war so far.
Trump spent the campaign insisting that he would make a number of major changes on day one. And considering that his party has a majority in both houses of Congress, he should have been able to pull off most of it by now. He seems to be slowly and quietly getting his way on rounding up undocumented immigrants who’ve done nothing wrong. But beyond that, for all his bluster and his authoritarian ambition, he’s mostly been firing blanks. Part of that has been his own incompetence and scandals. But an arguably larger part of it is that no incoming U.S. president has ever faced this kind broad, organized, overwhelming, and persistent level of resistance.
Trump’s Muslim ban was defeatable because he’s surrounded himself by arrogant know-nothings who didn’t know how to write an executive order. But that alone didn’t cause its defeat. The ACLU was able to get an immediate stay against it in court because the public was willing to quickly fund the ACLU’s effort. State Attorneys General were then willing to go into court and finish off the ban because they knew they were representing the will of the people.
Meanwhile Trump’s promise to immediately build a border wall has been a dud. Oh, and remember when Trump and the Republican Congress were going to repeal ObamaCare on day one? That still hasn’t happened yet, because We The People took to the streets and took over town halls and made clear to them that they would be doing so at their own political peril if they did it without an adequate replacement. And so it’s taken them nearly two months just to come up with a joke of a plan of their own, which doesn’t currently have enough support on their own side to pass. In other words, fifty days in, ObamaCare is still the law of the land. Once again, Trump is the loser.
Don’t get me wrong: in this war that Donald Trump and his bottom feeders have waged against the American mainstream, it’s America itself that’s losing. Our position in the world has fallen off a cliff; thanks to Trump, the United States is now the scorned laughing stock of the planet. Trump has largely gotten rid of the State Department and Justice Department so they can’t expose his decades of financial crimes or his more recent Russian treason. And yes, people who have lived nearly their entire lives as Americans are being rounded up simply based on their skin color, and being arbitrarily deported to countries they barely know. Horrible things are now happening in America by the day.
But once Donald Trump was named the winner of the election, we knew right then and there that things would be extraordinarily ugly for America for the next four years. If Trump were now getting his way, things would be even uglier. As it stands, thanks to the Resistance, he’s accomplished very little of what he had hoped to. He’s been backed into a defensive corner on Twitter where he spends most of his time whining and flailing, and very rarely has he gotten to play offense like he had hoped to. And now he’s wasted half of his most fertile hundred days with little to show for it.
Thus far, without question, Donald Trump is losing. The question now is whether the Resistance maintains its current efforts for the next fifty days and beyond, so that Trump never can graduate from playing defense – even as his Russia scandal closes in on him a bit more each day. Contribute to Palmer Report
