Trump’s Firehose First 100 Days

President Donald Trump marks his second one hundred days in office- the first being in 2017 when he won his first election as president. He was a bull in a china shop from the get go back then, but this time he has been a bulldozer rolling over liberal and left-wing policies with abandon.  The end result has been some positive results along with some negative ones which are hard for MAGA loyalists to agree on.

Trump started fast out of the gate with 26 executive orders and that number has grown to 139 as of the end of last week with more being issued every week. That is more than 100 more than he issued in his first term and more than triple that of Joe Biden who did what most presidents do which is reverse his predecessors’ actions when they are from the opposing party. It seems that Trump has decided that he was not only going to undo Biden-era policies but that of every Democrat in recent memory.  Most executive orders have little effect but in Trump’s case he has widened the scope enough so that there have been over 80 lawsuits filed challenging many of them. He is perfectly fine fighting them in court even though he risks losing a large number of them.

According to Gallup Trump has the second-lowest approval rating for any post WW II president which can largely be tied to his trade war which has injected uncertainty into the economy and sparked rising prices and talk of a recession. The stock market has taken its cue from the tariff turmoil and driven the S&P 500 index down almost 8% since Inauguration Day. The stock market took off after Trump was elected and hit record highs in February on optimism of a steadily growing economy but instead they have been blindsided by the tariff policies announced on Liberation Day April 2.  This is a self-inflicted wound or in sports parlance an unforced error. The economy was doing just fine and now no one knows what will happen six months from now much less tomorrow.

Trump has had success with his immigration policy with illegal border crossings at a 60-year low as deportations have made coming to America a risky proposition compared to under the Biden administration.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency has taken a whack at federal employment with uneven results as tens of thousands of federal employees have been laid off and 75,000 have taken voluntary buyouts but that number is still s drop in the bucket to the overall federal employment figures and many of the layoffs have occurred without any understanding of what the employees do. Instead of surgical precision, the Musk team fired employees willy nilly decimating needed services alongside the bloat. This has been a worthy effort but poorly carried out.

One of the biggest successes that Trump has had is in dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies in the government and in higher education which heavily relies on government grants. There are lawsuits surrounding many of these actions, but by and large DEI is on life support and is unlikely to return during this administration-if ever.

If I had to grade the first 100 days I would give it a C or generously a B-. Hopefully the rest of the Trump term will be more focused and not like the fire hose of the past three plus months.