Calgary Trump’s first one-hundred days are almost off the calendar, and, there’s no question, he’s breaking records and making history. Most of it are not the things that would normally be what would make a president proud.
His popularity has fallen faster than ever than his predecessors in this normally honeymoon period. The stock market has fallen like a rock. His tariff dreams paint a warm, fuzzy picture of the pre-war period where tariffs backfired and helped trigger the Great Depression. His hero William McKinley might get a mountain back in Alaska for a minute, but Trump will be lucky to have a molehill named after him at this rate. He has now targeted more opponents in a brutal fashion than any president since Woodrow Wilson. He has triggered worldwide opposition and reversed the fortunes of leaders in some countries like England, Mexico, and Canada because of revulsion over his policies.
He and his enablers continue to try to shift the story, head fake, misdirect, and, what the heck, fib, like there’s no tomorrow, but there’s no way to cover up the fact that the majority of Americas are scared. They don’t want the pain he has promised. They don’t want high prices and empty shelves at stores. They don’t want higher interest rates, unemployment lines, or long waits at government offices and VA hospitals. Farmers wanted to be able to sell their crops and feed their livestock, and can’t believe they have been left with high bills and no markets.
This may be what some of the hardcore MAGAs signed up for when they pulled the lever in the voting booth, but not the rest of America. Certainly, there’s a strain of xenophobia about foreign countries that’s always been in the USA. Trashing foreign aid and claiming everybody is taking advantage of us sells in some of these quarters. As the old saying goes, haters are going hate, and Trump is a master at picking those scabs.
There seems little question that millions may die here and abroad because of his policies. Trump and his team seem unfazed by all of this. Despite his increasingly losing record in court with much of this madness, he still seems to believe that he can get away with ignoring laws and procedures he doesn’t like. He doesn’t want to hear the old maxim that says, “if you don’t like a law, change it.” He just wants to pretend he can bluff and bully his way around the law.
Not surprisingly, to date the only people that have been able to convince him that their pain is real and pushed him to blink and rollback time after time are the few people who he still sees as his peers: the rich and big business. He has always believed the stock market was the true barometer of the economy, no matter how many economists told him differently. Investors there are voting against the crazy with their cash and pulling back. Bond daddies want stability not soundbites against his enemy lists. Businesses don’t want to invest and lose their money for fear of a recession or just plain and simple uncertainty. CEOs from Walmart and Target can get a meeting with him to explain how much the Chinese tariffs are hurting them, even if he ignores the rest of us. He’s OK cutting Medicaid, but, lordy, he wants to make sure wealth isn’t taxed more highly.
His peer group may not care if the rest of us are feeling the pain, but they don’t want to pay the price themselves or in their stock portfolios. For a narcissist this has to hurt that the Trump Slump is something he owns more fully than the Trump Tower or most of the properties with his name on them. He broke the economy, now he has to fix it by walking back and maybe even keeping his mouth shut for a minute, so we can all find some solid ground and catch a break.