100 days into Trump’s second term, everyone is saying it

Hello there,

Donald Trump celebrated 100 days in office this week, as the economy contracted for the first time in three years and as an avalanche of polling confirmed that his presidency, so far, has been shambolic.

No matter. “This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it,” Trump declared on Tuesday night.

Of course, no one is saying that. In fact, Trump’s most striking achievement may have been in making people dislike him even more, as even some Republicans have begun to notice that he isn’t very good at being president: a poll over the weekend found that only half of Republican voters believe Trump’s attention has been focussed on the right priorities.

The American public as a whole has even less faith in the president. Multiple polls in recent days showed that Trump has the lowest approval rating after 100 days of any president in the last 70 years. Even Fox News, which oscillates between being a Trump propaganda channel and a full-on brainwashing effort, reported that Trump had the lowest early-stage job approval of any president in recent memory.

The numbers get worse. More than half of American voters believe Trump is “exceeding the powers available to him”, according to a New York Times poll, while 59% of respondents think the president’s second term has been “scary”.

They’re the sort of damning reviews that would give any normal person pause for thought. But Trump is not a normal person and is not known for self-reflection. Instead, he ignored the scathing verdicts and immersed himself in the rightwing mirror world, spending most of Tuesday retweeting increasingly hyperbolic praise from Republicans.

He reposted a video of Bill Hagerty, Republican senator for Tennessee and likely Just For Men enthusiast, claiming: “This has been the most effective, most impactful in a positive sense 100 days in my lifetime”, and reposted a really quite eerie editorial written by Representative Mary Miller, in which she quoted the bible three times and said Trump was “lead[ing] with Biblical truth”.

Other Republicans lined up to declare that the US had experienced “100 days of SUCCESS” – days which, in their telling, have been “some of the most successful and productive in the history of our entire Republic”.

The reality has been different. Trump has signed just five bills into law in his first 100 days, which NBC News reported was fewer than any president since at least Dwight Eisenhower, who was elected more than 70 years ago.

And Trump’s century has been typified by decisions that range from hapless to terrifying. The president’s tariff scheme threatened to crash the global economy, and he has deported innocent people to a foreign gulag. Trump, who famously ran on an anti-immigration platform, has extended that to US citizens, too, deporting American-born children – including one with cancer – to Honduras this week.

Trump’s real achievements have been much more modest than his Republican cheerleaders would have him believe. As the journalist Aaron Rupar pointed out, even Fox News has struggled to sell the president’s achievements. In one segment on Tuesday, the news channel showed a pretty forlorn list of Trump’s successes, which was limited to “declassified the JFK files”, “ended federal support for paper straws” and “ended production of the penny”.

Trump also appears to have managed to dress himself each morning. He hasn’t publicly trodden in dog shit. He hasn’t been sick on himself. He hasn’t been impeached yet. He is yet to look directly at the sun.

Yet despite those wins, the president is yet to win over his public, even on traditional Republican staples like the economy and immigration. And this week, an Axios poll found that, as well as disliking Trump, most Americans now see him as a “dangerous dictator”.

Everyone’s saying it!