Trump’s 10 Worst Actual Accomplishments from His First 100 Days

Donald Trump, our nation’s major reason for drinking, has just completed his first hundred days. And while there is occasion to remark how he has failed, we might do better to look at where he has unfortunately succeeded.

Regarding the Trump’s Presidency thus far, there are plenty of stories about what a slapstick masterpiece they have been.

But comedy, unfortunately, is not the sole product of this Administration. Trump has not succeeded, but he has longingly flirted with success here and there. While there have been a shortage of big-ticket extreme Doomsday scenarios, in other places, the President has sowed the whirlwind. The current regime has been short of new, unprecedented dangers, but it has encouraged and expanded the usual, boring dangers. Here, then, is a list of the ten worst accomplishments of Trump’s first One Hundred:

1. Climate change will proceed as planned.

The environment is looking more doomed every day, and none of these people care. Politico tells us:

Trump has spent much of his first 100 days in office launching a series of efforts to undo former President Barack Obama’s domestic climate policies, seeking to ease pollution limits on power plants, vehicle tailpipes, coal mining, and oil and gas wells. And while Democrats and environmental groups promise fierce resistance, analysts say Trump’s efforts could bring an effective halt to U.S. efforts to cut the carbon pollution that scientists blame for warming the planet. “This is an experiment we can only run once, and then it’s too late,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer.

2. The future will not be populist, it will be plutocratic.

The Hill has the full story:

The 17 people filling President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet and similar positions earn more money than a third of households in America combined, Quartz reported Thursday. The amount of wealth possessed by the 17 picks, at least $9.5 billion, is greater than the 43 million least wealthy households in America. Quartz included Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, on its list. The wealthiest members of Trump’s Cabinet include Education pick Betsy DeVos, who is worth $5.1 billion, and Commerce pick Wilbur Ross, who is worth $2.9 billion.

3. The drilling will continue, forever.

From Mother Jones:

In late March, President Trump signed his 19th executive order, titled “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” which in addition to rolling back a number of Obama-era climate polices may also make it easier for energy companies to drill in America’s national parks. Buried in the 2,300-word executive order is a sentence directing the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, to review the rules which regulate oil and gas drilling in national parks and to repeal, suspend, or rescind them if they are found inconsistent with the president’s energy goals.

4. We might be at war with North Korea soon.

In case you weren’t scared about that turning into a thing, we have breaking news that, indeed, or bright new radioactive future is on the horizon. Reuters carried the news:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday a major conflict with North Korea is possible in the standoff over its nuclear and missile programs, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute.

“There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely,” Trump told Reuters in an Oval Office interview ahead of his 100th day in office on Saturday. Nonetheless, Trump said he wanted to peacefully resolve a crisis that has bedeviled multiple U.S. presidents, a path that he and his administration are emphasizing by preparing a variety of new economic sanctions while not taking the military option off the table. “We’d love to solve things diplomatically but it’s very difficult,” he said.

You know what else is difficult? Literally everything else about war.

5. Neil Gorsuch will be on the court for the next, oh, one hundred years or so.

I think this is self-explanatory. The NRA Director for Legislative Action, Chris Cox, just said so:

“He was our candidate, the most proudly pro-Second Amendment nominee in American history,” Cox said in the inaugural address of the NRA convention’s Leadership Forum. “So we made the earliest endorsement for president the NRA’s history. And all of you had his back from that moment on.”

6. The travel ban almost happened, and could still happen.

According to the Huffington Post:

President Donald Trump has declared time and again that he wants to see the challengers of his stalled immigration orders in court. But will the American public get to see him — or at least his lawyers — in court?

Thanks to C-SPAN, the public affairs cable network, anyone with a cable or internet connection will get live access to courtrooms on two coasts as federal judges consider whether to lift a pair of injunctions that last month stopped Trump’s retooled travel ban dead in its tracks.This week, the decades-old network got the green light from the federal appeals courts in Richmond, Virginia, and San Francisco to broadcast live audio and video from oral arguments in the lead travel ban cases, International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump on May 8 and Hawaii v. Trump on May 15.

7. Accused the previous guy of wiretapping.

So this is both good and healthy for the progress of democracy. To quote the Times:

The president later revealed that this extraordinary allegation was based entirely on publicly available news reports — none of which actually supported the substance of his claim. Asked by Tucker Carlson how he came to discover that his predecessor had spied on him, Trump cited a New York Times article that did have the words “wiretapped data” in its headline. But the story was about intelligence agencies monitoring Russian officials — and how, through that regular surveillance, they may have discovered contacts between those officials and Trump associates.

8. Hired a guy who spent his life lobbying for pollution.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is like appointing me Secetary of Jam Bands: how could I administer something I’ve spent my entire life fighting?

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists:

To stop such regulation in its tracks, Scott Pruitt filed a lawsuit to overturn the endangerment finding, which he and his fellow litigants characterized as “arbitrary and capricious.” Believe it or not, Pruitt’s primary argument was that the EPA should not have relied upon the multiple reports on climate change issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)(established by the United Nations which synthesizes the work of thousands of scientists), the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) (a Bush administration body of 13 federal agencies that issued 21 reports on climate change), and the National Research Council (NRC)(the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences).

9. He will encourage an even worse alt-right reaction in the long run.

Eventually, the grassroots will get upset that Trump has aided nobody, and not brought the factories back. Then what will they do? Let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth, or at least the talking mule’s. From altright.com:

I’ve put together a timeline of my disillusionment with President Trump using my own blog entries. This is only my own personal trajectory, but it covers all the key events …

The writer goes on to literally construct a timeline of disbelief in the great god Trump, which begins with “Donald Trump wins the 2016 presidential election. The Alt-Right is euphoric.” But alas, the breakup happened as soon as the Deploraball:

From December 27 to January 4, we feuded with the Alt-Lite over the #Deploraball. By New Year’s Eve, it was clear that the incoming Trump administration wasn’t going to be challenging the status quo. The Alt-Lite was desperate to ride the Trump Train into the mainstream. It was apparent to us that the new line was going to be the same as the old line with one major difference: “racism” and “anti-Semitism” were going to remain taboo, but homosexuality would now be celebrated.

It ends, as some parts of young, drunk love do, with a bit of soul-searching:

It was a stunning turn of events. Donald Trump ripped up his “America First” foreign policy and threw it in the garbage in order to appease the political establishment. In doing so, he severely undermined our confidence in his character, cast doubt on every other promise he made on the campaign trail and sawed off the leg of his appeal that comes from a non-interventionist foreign policy. … We gave Trump’s America almost a hundred days. It only took 76 days to be revealed as false paradise.

You and may laugh that Trump has been kicked out off the wild honeymoon stallion, but this delight will only last until the alt-right finds a new Father. Until the causes of the alt-right are denied and demolished, the campaign of America’s most unpleasant ideology, will remain undiminished. They provide oxygen to the worst parts of political culture. When they are diminished, then their ideas are diminished, and when their ideas are diminished, the world will be a lot saner.

10. He has no idea what he’s doing in foreign policy.

Generally, foreign policy expertise is overrated, because it’s staffed by deep state head-nodders who think the coolest thing in the world is supporting dictators and backing Saudi failsons. But this is worse. Trump has no clue what he’s doing. He’s surrounded by National Security hacks, and that’s the good news. Think of what that means. War will be his one-size fits all solution. And the way he conducts “business” suggests there is no there there. At some deep, bone-inside level, he doesn’t quite get it.

According to New York Magazine:

Instead of hosting the Japanese prime minister at the White House, Trump opted to fly Shinzo Abe down to the private resort he owns in Palm Beach, Florida. This choice of venue cost American taxpayers millions in additional travel-and-security expenses. But it also allowed the president to directly profit off the diplomatic meeting, while increasing the perks of being a member of his club. Now, Mar-a-Lago members don’t merely have access to golf, a private beach, and a network of fellow plutocrats — they also get seats in the president’s open-air Situation Room.

I am not afraid that Trump will cost the diplomacy apparatus years of their lives in anxiety. I am concerned that he will overreact and blow the top off the world. God forbid we have a Cuban Missile Crisis again. America has always been the kind of nation that could fight two wars at the same time; if you want to call that a blessing, go for it. But whether we can handle having a crisis, and President Trump at the same time, remains to be seen.