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And That's 100!

   

This is Trump’s 100th day in office, and so the last of my daily posts (for now).

Trump made a lot of promises during his campaign. He has delivered on very few of them. Politifact’s Trump-O-Meter gives you a good sense of what he’s accomplished, which is to say: not much. Plenty of things are “in the works” but that doesn’t mean they will ever happen.

Immediately after taking office, Trump put out a flurry of Executive Orders, many of which met with stiff resistance. Some were outright struck down, like both iterations of his Muslim travel ban. He’s not done much of anything to improve the economy, other than be in office–Wall Street seems happy enough about him being President, at least. But in terms of actually doing anything, it would be hard to say Trump has much to show for his first 100 days. This is the man who made a lot of bold promises about how much he’d accomplish in that period, too, and once it became clear he’d fall far short of his own benchmark, started talking about how 100 days was an unfair standard to begin with.

Today, Trump is giving a speech in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, a climate march is happening in DC. We’ve temporarily avoided a government shutdown. The Republican effort to “repeal and replace” Obamacare has stalled and may not resurface for a while. Trump’s tax plan, released this past week, has been savaged by critics. “Embattled” has been the best description of Trump’s Presidency virtually since it began.

In terms of foreign policy, Trump’s first 100 days showed a lot of bluster but, surprisingly, no real shift from the Bush/Obama years. Trump likes to threaten war, and yet his actions don’t show any profound changes relative to his immediate predecessors. It could be that foreign policy is being handled by people with experience, who are convincing Trump to listen to them. Even so, this relative calm may not last.

Trump himself admitted recently he wasn’t prepared to be President–he’s lonely, it’s harder than he expected, and he just doesn’t seem to be enjoying it very much. Probably anyone could have told him that would be the case, back before he even entered the race. One wonders if he’ll decline to seek reelection in 2020, or even just quit sooner than that. If I had to summarize the Trump administration so far, it would be: incompetent and bad, but not as bad as it could have been.

On a more personal note, I set out to make posts like this over Trump’s first 100 days, with the intention being that I would offer concrete actions readers could take on each one. This quickly proved to be a difficult undertaking and one which I did not fulfill as well as I could have. Most of the time, I had nothing better to offer than “contact Congress,” which may be effective on some issues but gets repetitive after a while, and doesn’t feel like action if that’s all you’re doing. The same stories also kept coming up, like the ongoing drama with Russia and members of Trump’s administration. As with my original intentions for this blog, this was a worthwhile experiment for me, but it is definitely time to move on. Resilient Constructs is certainly not dead, but I don’t anticipate posting on a daily basis again anytime soon. I’ll post when I feel I have something to say, and I have a number of feature articles I need to work on for publication here or elsewhere (in which case I’ll link them here). By no means do I think Trump is beaten or that his opposition should relax–quite the opposite. But I’m going to find different ways to keep fighting.

I’ll be in touch.