Author’s note: This article has been proofread by Louise Mensch. Any fake news contained herein is therefore impossible unless Vladimir Putin hacked American Greatness, which he probably did right after faking the moon landing.
In our last installment covering the first 100 days of President Trump’s tenure, we touched on the area where Trump has had the most unquestioned successes: namely, foreign policy. Now, we turn to the area where the media and the Left are fond of saying Trump has been least successful: domestic policy.
A Small Potato World Class Villain?
On that front, Trump spent his first few days in office ruthlessly gutting Obama-era regulations, and even authorized the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a move which somehow managed to be both an apocalyptic, unprecedented act of environmental rape, and political small potatoes that only an inexperienced rube like Trump would count as an accomplishment of any weight, depending on which liberal consultant was emailing headlines to press outlets.
In response to this political small ball/villains’ plot from a “Captain Planet” episode, along with the aforementioned anti-regulatory measures (which liberals almost described as child-killing before Planned Parenthood asked what was so bad about that), the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 20,000 for the first time ever and has stayed above that ever since. Democrats responded to this milestone by pointing out that Hillary Clinton would’ve hit a record in the Popular Stock Average, a concept which has just as much meaning as the popular vote.
Nevertheless, the first few weeks of Trump’s term were dizzying in terms of the amount of executive action taken, to the point that many Democrats doubted that anyone would be able to defile their cherished institutions so successfully in the future. They have since concluded that only Bret Stephens is capable of such atrocities.
Masterclass Rhetoric
Trump also began to show mastery of the ceremony of statecraft, as in late February he delivered a widely praised speech to a joint session of Congress, even going so far as to bring the Congress to its feet for a record setting amount of time in order to applaud Kerryn Owens, the young widow of a fallen soldier. Democrats in particular were horrified by this, because instruments of American imperialism should never be applauded, and besides, her slain husband was white and male, and therefore his death was a win for progress. Unsurprisingly, these actual reasons don’t play with voters, and so Democrats resorted to accusing Trump of using Mrs. Owens as a prop to justify unjustifiable military decisions. Nakouley Basseley Nakoula could not be reached for comment.
Hitting an Immigration Wall
In any case, despite these early successes, all presidents must hit obstacles eventually, and so it was with President Trump. He faced adversity almost as soon as he began to tackle immigration. Specifically, Trump issued a ban on travel to the United States by residents of seven different countries, with the added wrinkle that it extended even to current green card holders from those countries.
align=”left” [A] district court judge blocked the ban for reasons that can approximately be summed up as, “Trump said things that upset my country club while campaigning, and I care more about that than what the law actually says.” When this order was taken to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges declared that the Constitution and the ban said something different in their safe spaces, and therefore the ban was likely unconstitutional everywhere.
Predictably, the Left went into hysterics over the fact that Trump had taken such a draconian and unforeseeable step that he had been talking about since 2015. As a result, several problems immediately hit the administration: First, demonstrators swarmed airports to protest the ban, an event which the airports were powerless to stop because none of the demonstrators had tickets for United Airlines to steal, and thus there was no way to force them out. Second, a district court judge blocked the ban for reasons that can approximately be summed up as, “Trump said things that upset my country club while campaigning, and I care more about that than what the law actually says.” When this order was taken to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges declared that the Constitution and the ban said something different in their safe spaces, and therefore the ban was likely unconstitutional everywhere.
President Trump reacted, understandably, by blasting both courts for their blatant partisanship and biased reading of the law. At this, every legal commentator on the Left immediately declared that Trump was undermining the independence of the judiciary and seeking to destroy the American system of checks and balances before penning more think pieces arguing for the court to be packed so that Citizens United could be overturned.
Contrary to the fears of his critics that Trump might imitate Andrew Jackson and refuse to obey the courts, Trump decided to reissue the travel ban in more legally sound terms, at which point another judge protested that Trump had also said things that upset his country club, and blocked the second travel ban in retaliation.
Despite these setbacks, the day-to-day enforcement tactics of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly so terrified would-be illegal immigrants that illegal immigration dropped by over 60 percent. Seeing this, Trump decided to keep President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order in place, so that those same childhood arrivals would have an easier time using the interstate highway system to flee to Canada. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, was spotted wandering in the woods of Utah in nothing but a hair shirt, all while muttering “self deportation” and sobbing.
Judging the Justice
That said, Trump was clearly angered by the antics of activist judges, because shortly after taking office, he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. This met with universal acclaim from both Trump supporters and Conservatism, Inc., though sources tell American Greatness that Erick Erickson privately fretted that it was bad Christian witness to accept a Supreme Court nomination from a man who has appeared on the cover of Playboy.
Democrats, meanwhile, energetically began telling the country that Neil Gorsuch had let a man freeze to death in his truck, a move that caused a minor crisis of conscience in their base, who had recently decided that they rather liked chilling effects.
At his confirmation hearing, Gorsuch had the audacity to sound intelligent while white, male, and better informed on the law than certain female Senators, at which point the Left decided that on no account could a man who actually knew about a subject be allowed anywhere near power. As a result, they dug in fiercely against Gorsuch, until Mitch McConnell finally pulled the plug on the judicial filibuster altogether, an act that caused a minor panic in Washington, D.C., as the sound of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s desolate wailing reached the pitch and volume of an air raid siren.
Healthcare Ails
Having filled Antonin Scalia’s seat with one of the staunch conservative justices on his announced list (or, as Brent Bozell III insisted on calling Gorsuch, “Trump’s Sister”), the president then moved on to the topic of healthcare. Here things got complicated quickly, as the House Freedom Caucus insisted on a bill that would not merely repeal Obamacare, but also designate a national Obamacare Repeal Day, in which Americans would be encouraged to urinate on replicas of the bill. The moderate Tuesday Group, meanwhile, announced that they would only support an Obamacare repeal bill if Trump were immediately replaced by John Kasich. Unable to fill either of these requests, and lost for ideas, Speaker Paul Ryan instead called the heads of multiple insurance companies and asked, “So we know Obamacare already gave you most of what you want, but anything else?”
align=”right” Trump was clearly angered by the antics of activist judges, because shortly after taking office, he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. This met with universal acclaim from both Trump supporters and Conservatism, Inc., though sources tell American Greatness that Erick Erickson privately fretted that it was bad Christian witness to accept a Supreme Court nomination from a man who has appeared on the cover of Playboy.
The result was the American Health Care Act, a bill which managed to infuriate practically every member of the House and Senate except for Ryan’s staffers. The Democrats, flummoxed as to which angle to attack the bill from first, eventually settled on accusing the bill of repealing a major entitlement for the first time: an attack that, while accurate, somehow did not manage to win it the support of the House Freedom Caucus. Trump, meanwhile, who saw the bill as the fulfillment of a campaign promise and also possibly leverage to get Speaker Ryan to shut up about how we needed to lower labor costs so that the strikers in Galt’s Gulch would come home, tried desperately to get it through, but eventually had to permit the bill to be pulled.
This caused the press to enter a fit of jubilation, declaring that Trump had “failed” on healthcare. Their jubilation was cut short, however, when it was discovered that Ryan could just revise the bill: a concept that doubly horrified the press, because most of them had never encountered the concept of revision before. As of now, the bill is being held up by the Tuesday Group, who remain horrified at the idea of overturning an entitlement because, come on, that’s what Russia would do!
Tax Reform For People Who Refuse to Win
Just before his 100 days were up, however, Trump signaled that some form of success could be on the horizon in two distinct ways. First, he released a proposed tax reform package so bold that upon reading it, Grover Norquist had to be carted out of Americans for Tax Reform, sobbing that he had seen the face of God. Unfortunately, as with everything Americans want, Congress likely views the tax cut package as dangerous, dead on arrival, and far too drastic for serious people (read: lobbyists who donate to them) to support.
Secondly, Trump and Congress came to an agreement to keep the government open until September. And while the details of the bill have made both Jeb Bush and John Kasich (unfortunately not kidding about Kasich) crow over being right about what could be done in the policy world, Democrats are taking a big risk because, in signing this bill, they are signing away their leverage on GOP policymaking for the next four months.
However, they likely have nothing to worry about, given that getting something through the GOP-controlled congress is not merely like herding cats, but even more complicated because the cats in question are arguing over which breed is superior.
Thus ends this retrospective on Trump’s first 100 days. With any luck, the succeeding four years will be not only as entertaining, but also at least as good.
element_content=””]