As with many presidents, how you evaluate Donald Trump’s first hundred days in his second term all depends on how seriously you take his rhetoric. With Trump, there are the ostensible goals that you would have heard on the campaign trail, in public remarks, and in press releases and other official communiques. And then there are the goals being pursued by the various ideologues and profiteers who have latched onto his presidency to advance their own pet interests.
In style at least, Trump’s first hundred days have been the aggressive, vigorous spectacle he promised it would be. He has wielded executive power in ways and on a scale that are unprecedented, with little care for norms, tradition, or, often, legal constraints, and has deliberately tested the limits of what the US political system will let one man do.
In this respect, Trump has put Joe Biden’s presidency — sold at the time as a pathbreaking Franklin Roosevelt–style flurry of presidential action in a national emergency — to shame, showing what a leader militantly willing to take drastic steps to meet his ideological goals actually looks like. Depending on what count you use, Biden signed either forty-two executive orders in his first hundred days, or more than sixty. Either figure is just a fraction of the 137 executive orders Trump has signed so far, a rate of more than one a day.
Some of Trump’s defiance of norms and institutions has been unacceptably authoritarian and dangerous no matter where you stand. His targeting of various political opponents and dissidents, his deportations of lawful US residents, his defiance of court orders and threats toward, and now even an arrest of, judges. But some of them — like acting quickly and unilaterally to end programs and…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
