
The payoff has been somewhere between pitiful and nonexistent, unless your idea of presidential success involves seeing others suffer.
The calamitous nature of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office shouldn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention before the election.
He has done things he said he would do, many of them cruel, many of them damaging to both the U.S. economy and to America’s reputation on the global stage. He allowed an unelected billionaire to run roughshod over the federal government, slashing valuable agencies and smugly ruining the lives of an army of federal workers who had devoted themselves to research or to global aid or to helping their fellow Americans. He put a vaccine-denying loon in charge of America’s health as a measles outbreak has spread across the Southwest. His wildly unqualified Defense secretary spared little time getting embroiled in multiple scandals, including texting sensitive U.S. war plans to his wife over a commercial messaging app.
Every day has brought a crass comment or cruel act, some development that would have ended any other president or Cabinet member, things large and small that have made America worse.