Trump's First Hundred Days in Office – and the World Hasn't Ended
In the words of the president of the United States himself, we are about to reach "the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days."
To my mind, what's been really ridiculous about the first 100 days is the way Trump has been treated by his opponents – as if he's some bizarre and alien character who inexplicably rose to the highest office in America.
In fact, Donald Trump is probably the most American regular Joe we've ever elected – with all the typical "best of" and "the rest of" regular Joe qualities.
Yeah, he's full of baloney sometimes, but he's full of patriotism, too... He's an old grouch about the way things are in this country, but he's a downy-cheeked optimist about the way things could be... He loves his family, even if – like many of us – he's a divorce or two short of perfection in this regard... He's lousy at explaining himself. And aren't we all? Americans should, every one of us, have "never complain, never explain." tattooed on our Twitter thumbs... Trump's decisive. Maybe he's over-decisive. As my wife says about me: "Often wrong, but never uncertain."
I'm an American regular Joe myself. Trump wasn't my ideal pick for president. But I wouldn't have been my ideal pick for president, either. (Unless maybe the only other choice was Hillary.)
So we have an American regular Joe in charge. And when I look at major news outlets (the Wall Street Journal and Fox News sometimes excepted), all I see is that an American regular Joe can't do anything right.
I swear, if Trump cured cancer, the headline in the New York Times would be: "Heart Disease Kills More People."
But as far as I can tell, Trump's doing OK. A few ups, a few downs. Some new administrations have done better. Some (Obama's!) have done much worse.
Trump didn't appoint his golf caddy, his masseuse at Trump International Hotel, or the guy who gold-plates his bathroom fixtures to his cabinet.
Most of Trump's appointments have been good. Some have been brilliant... such as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
And I'll take Rex Tillerson any time over Obama's Secretaries of State – Mrs. Bossy Pantsuit and Mr. Snoot.
White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has some people worried. He may be a bit of a cracked egghead. But Bannon is the main intellectual force in an administration that – in true American regular Joe fashion – has no use for intellectuals. So Steve's pissing in the wind.
The main beef against Trump appointees seems to be that they have conflicts of interest concerning their businesses and investments. Good for them! At least they have businesses and investments. As opposed to Obama's appointees who were a bunch of out-of-work know-it-alls whose sole business was bossing everybody in America around.
The other beef about appointees is that Trump has set the foxes to guard the henhouses – notably Rick Perry at the Department of Energy, Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, and Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Well, it's all right to set the foxes to guard the henhouse when you hate the chickens... Especially if the chickens are huge, ferocious, regulatory predators. (Birds are descended from dinosaurs – especially the dirty birds of bureaucracy.)
How about the rest of the Trump 100-day record?
TV talking heads, op-ed pundits, and other pests were in a frenzy of concern that Trump would get in bed with the Russkis. If so, Donald slipped between the sheets with 59 Tomahawk missiles concealed under his negligee.
Putin is probably wishing he had done his election hack the other way around, in hope of getting another "reset" button like the one he received from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009.
Yes, Trump backtracked on labeling the Chinese as currency manipulators. Fine with me, if that's what it takes to get China to kick the crazy North Korean fatso Kim Jong-un in his ample pants seat and rename him "Kim Jong-none."
Besides, as every reader of the Stansberry Digest knows, all governments manipulate their currencies.
Yes, Obamacare repeal-and-replace legislation failed... and that's a good thing. The Republicans had eight years to come up with a simple, common-sense way to protect Americans from catastrophic health care costs. Plus, every conservative and libertarian think tank in the country had an off-the-shelf, "close enough for government work" plan ready to go.
Instead, we got the unpalatable American Health Care Act. The "failure" of AHCA was like the failure of a toddler to get under the sink and drink bleach.
As for Trump's executive orders, most look good... Mandated reviews of, among other things, international trade deals, Dodd-Frank banking regulations, and Obama's Clean Power Plan that depends on fair-weather solar and fresh-breeze wind when in the still of the dark, cold night, we may need coal.
Other orders he has put in place...
- A top-to-bottom audit of the executive branch: Pull the IRS trolls off the Tea Party and sic 'em on the West Wing.
- The "Two for One" rule: When federal agencies introduce a new regulation, the federal regulators have to eliminate two old regulations or go get a real job.
- The federal government hiring freeze: It can't get too cold in that moldy fridge.
- Approving the Keystone XL pipeline: It's a gusher!
So far, the Trump tax-reform program has what might be called an "underpants problem," otherwise known as "The BVD Difficulty: Bold, Vague, and Doomed."
My only significant complaint against Trump is the anti-immigrant stuff. Kick the criminals out, by all means... But I don't like the general scapegoating of immigrants. We're a nation of immigrants. Even Native Americans arrived from Siberia and presumably were processed at some sort of Arctic Ellis Island staffed with saber-toothed tigers.
But I blame America's welfare and entitlement programs for anti-immigrant feelings more than I blame Trump. Almost all of us came here as poor people, the way modern immigrants do. Poor people used to be an asset. Poor people dug America's canals, laid America's railways, paved America's roads. And in the process, they became un-poor.
Now, what with the cost of welfare and entitlement programs, poor people are a liability. Under our modern system, Abraham Lincoln's family would have wound up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camp. And plantation-bred spoiled rich kid (and later Confederate Secretary of War) John C. Breckinridge would have been elected president.
So ease up on the immigrants, Donald... and bear down on the entitlements.
One more thing, Mr. President. You're going to Mar-a-Lago too much. Not that I mind you being out of Washington. We wanted a chief executive who was a Washington outsider... And now we're going to complain because he's outside Washington?
It's not that... or the Secret Service expense... or the wining and dining of foreign big shots at the private club you happen to own.
It's just that I have friends in Palm Beach. They fly in and out of there. They are sick and tired of Palm Beach International Airport being closed down every weekend for security reasons.
If you're going to be an American regular Joe president, you don't want a bunch of other American regular Joes mad at you because they can't use their Gulfstream G550 private jets. Mr. President, take the train.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke