The first 100 days
2 May 2025
Here are excerpts from two blogs I recommend subscribing to as examples of independent, honest media that are not afraid to criticize the President:
Historian Heather Cox Richardson discusses the history of the first 100 days, comparing FDR to Trump:
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.
. . .
Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”
In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.
But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in his first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.
Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies. Full article
Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian writes:
Trump is worse off than he was 100 days ago. The battle for democracy, however, is not yet won.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill, 1942
We therefore cannot tell if the last week or so leading up to the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, decency, and truth has definitively shifted momentum toward the pro-democracy movement or just temporarily sidetracked Trump’s march to autocracy. If and only if pro-democracy forces draw the right lessons, cement their alliances, and pursue their MAGA assailants relentlessly will recent events come to be recognized as the end of the beginning of the fight to preserve the American experiment.
Multiple data points from just the last fortnight suggest Trump’s presidency is in disarray:
. . .
In short, Trump lost the first 100 days, but democracy has not won the war. Had the Allies not gone on to prevail on D-Day and win WWII, their victory in North Africa in 1942, which inspired Churchill’s memorable observation, would have been viewed in retrospect as a bump in the road on the way to Nazi victory. Without persistent, ongoing opposition, recent victories on multiple fronts cannot end the MAGA threat. Full article
I have focused my efforts on 3 areas:
Become more politically active or find ways to be more effective.
Spend more money at small businesses. Avoid national chains and other big businesses, if possible, unless they have taken a stand against Trump.
Support independent media, including blogs that are not afraid to criticize Trump, including Abortion Every Day, Chris Bowers, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Scott Dworkin and The Contrarian.
The index to my prior essays (mostly post 5 November 2024) is here.
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