Don't be hard on yourself for the mistakes, you've made a bunch, plus you put on your personal spin.

But that is to be expected and it is a thankless job to assemble all this stuff and I appreciate the effort.

We should treat your list the same way I treat Wikipedia, it's a good portal to get some quick facts on a topic, but once you have the general overview of a topic, you need to verify the specifics on all keys points if you are in any way staking your reputation on the information you are retrieving.




Favorite gaffe in the list from day 12:

• Lyndon Johnson nominated Homer Thornberry on June 26th of his last year.
• Dwight Eisenhower recess-appointed William Brennan in October, three weeks before the 1956 election.
• In both of the latter cases, the Senate confirmed the nominees.

Justice Homer Thornberry. LOL



Seriously though, good job on a thankless task. I have found it useful several times in the past 100 days.

Mistakes: I made a few...Yeah, it was an amateur effort. The Thornberry one, though--I believe I cribbed that off a professional historian and didn't think to fact check him.

Your work is much appreciated.

Gods work.

I would like to see a new thread for days 101-200.

Thanks for the kind words! Someone else will have to do it. I'm converting my Trump outrage compiling time into poker learning time for the next year.

suitedJ, thanks for doing this. I've found it useful, and I've linked it to a few other people that were looking for something comprehensive.

Question about it for you: since you needed to follow his actions and the actions of his staff relatively closely for the last three months, what events were the most surprising as it was happening? Do you feel like your own perspective has become more optimistic, or more pessimistic, as a result?

I avoided the news for a long time after the election and even into his presidency, so I'm curious how following the news closely would affect a person these last few months.

Not sure if we're taking general responses on Trump's first 100 days, but:

Given the generally worst-case scenarios that were on the table -- the risk of which still remains extent -- I feel like Trump opponents have to be buoyed a little bit. Certainly not cheered, but on the whole, Trump seems totally ineffectual and meandering and distractable and not really capable of delivering on any of his worst aspirations.

So while the resistance to Trump has had some successful, high profile protests and events like the Women's March and airport protests against travel bans but relatively and historically speaking, there's been very little genuine public outrage or street violence or anything that is rocking the system to its core or anything like that. It ain't 1968 out there. And the judiciary has put a few roadblocks in front of Trump, which has (so far, anyway) largely caused Trump to retreat to Twitter and whine and not much else.

Perhaps Trump's highest profile failures -- health care reform -- seems to be the GOP being unable to get out of its own way and a testament to how quickly the ACA has become part of the the political consensus -- very hard to dismantle and plenty of informal veto points and roadblocks.

To me that's to the good, relative to the worst case scenarios. If you set out to map Trump's first 100 days, I think "brazen incompetence with a mix of laziness and distraction" had to be in the range of probable outcomes, and it's better than holistic global chaos or the fast-track to neofascist erosion of liberties and other stuff you might imagine a more effective version of Trump would be moving on by now.

But it seems like the biggest fear from here is that there remains an underlying system social and perhaps economic crisis afoot that led to Trump and will remain stirring and gestating during the Trump Administration. It's not clear where the forces are headed. I don't think the left has really sold the public on any kind of alternative and to the extent the Democratic Party remains a vessel for the fortunes of the left, it might be even worse shape. Still a lot of righteously angry out there, perhaps even more angry morons out there, no magical huge economic growth on the horizon to paper over all the angst, and very little constructive forces shaping politics or civic life.

It would be one thing if Trump were failing due to strident, principled opposition to Trumpism and was due to a nascent and growing appreciation of better alternatives. Instead it seems like Trump's bumbling first 100 days is *mostly* an artifact of the creeping national Idiocracy forces that put him there in the first place and makes Trump who he is.

So my tl;dr summary of Trump's first 100 days: not yet the Titanic but more like one of those cruise ships that lost its engine power and is sitting in the ocean collecting **** and garbage, and the passengers are furious and the captain is drunk and napping and maybe a lot of people have norovirus. And most critically all of the restive energy that assumed making a notorious drunk as captain of the lumbering cruise ship adrift at sea hasn't gone anywhere, and some of the passengers seem torn between insisting we steer toward icebergs, while others sing the virtues of hurricanes, and still others insist the first-class passengers are having a decent go of it right now so maybe sitting around adrift at sea for a while is a good idea and will just calm everyone down.

Trump is even worse and more moronic than imagined. I expected a semi-machivellin pivot. However, his stupidity is a virtue, because it renders him comical and ineffective. Also, he's kinda killed Fox and the Heritage Foundation, delegitimized "values voters" and saved Obamacare. Just on those, if his presidency ended today it would be a success (except for Gorsich).

Thanks for the kind words! The first few days were by far the most surprising. When Spicer made his debut demanding that the press acknowledge that, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” I knew that we had something historic on hand. This was a huge and obvious bald-faced lie, and right out of the gate.

Just a few days later, nearly everyone had forgotten about it, due to the subsequent pile of lies and outrages that followed. That's when it struck me that someone had to write this **** down.

I am more optimistic now than I was in the first few weeks. He's been thwarted on his more egregious policies. The system is holding for now. People are still motivated to resist, and calling their reps, showing up at town halls, and marching, and I think we have a good basis for at least taking the Senate back in 18 months.

Also, there's a website that's been doing the same type of day-to-day chronicling, and likely doing it a lot better, and they're continuing past day 100.

I can't post the link due to the profanity filter but it's called What the F*** Just Happened Today.

The thing with Trump is that most of what he says is complete bull****. It's him wanting the headline and doing everything he can to get it. And the press plays right into it. The press (and to an extent his opponents) run with his stupid tweets as though the world is ending. I mean he says he'll do things that are impossible to do. Examples would be banning flag-burning with the penalty being loss of citizenship or his ridiculous budget/tax cut proposals and they are reported as though they could actually happen. These aren't realistic goals. They're the types of things crazy people write on walls with their own ****.

Just wish a MSM outlet would just go, "Trump makes bull**** proposal that will never happen." on some side article rather than a headline or top story. To be honest, I think Trump being a small article on CNN would be make him more angry than anything else you could do.

Agree that Trump's ineffectiveness has been a godsend. Not really super surprising since Trump has no patience or gumption whatsoever. The danger always was, and remains, that the slimeballs surrounding him use him as a tool to enact their agendas. I think the big surprise is just how ineffective the GOP has been while controlling all branches of government. I'm not saying this is some huge unexpected shock, just saying in a manner similar to DVaut that on the spectrum of possible outcomes, this probably counts as unexpectedly good.

So I was just reading through this and was struck by the lack of any positive notes whatsoever. I thought ok, we all hate him but surely this is biased he must have accomplished something benevolent or beneficial by now.

So I Wiki'd it, and nope, he literally has done no good in 100 days as President of the United States. Unless you're a coal company or some such that benefitted from deregulation, not even something small, no chance you've been helped.

Mostly he has just been ineffectual, so that seems like a big win but how awesome can Trump be? Is he really going to serve a full term and be able to say that he didn't even pretend to do a single good thing for the people? GOAT status?

Day 12

• WH issues assurances that it will continue to protect the rights of LGBTQ people in the workplace.
• An order allowing discrimination against LGBTQ people based on religious exemptions is reportedly scuttled by Trump's daughter and son-in-law.

Day 32

• Picks Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to replace Flynn as his national security adviser.
• McMaster is a well-regarded historian and seen as a favorable choice by many.

Day 99

• Touts his accomplishment of helping to streamline veterans benefits, which is an extension of an existing Obama-era program.

I also pointed out when one of the targets of his wrath was less than honest.

Day 75

• [Susan] Rice at first denied knowing anything about the incidental surveillance after it was made public by Rep Nunes.
• She lied when she said that.

I know it's not much. And they've reversed themselves on the Day 12 LGBT assurances in a number of cases. For sure, I could have looked harder.

There are a lot of things his supporters feel that he's accomplished, but they generally fall into two sort of overlapping categories: vague concepts and things the rest of the country actively dislikes.

I'm not sure the line "Hey we were planning to unconstitutionally **** over LGBTQ rights but my prettiest daughter said nah so nah" meets my minimum definition of benevolent.

He's appointed well over 100 people but apparently one of them may not be grossly incompetent? It's a sad state of affairs if that's meeting the definition of beneficial, but here we are so I guess.

Hey day 99 that counts. It was an Obama initiative so he hasn't actually done anything himself yet but apparently he has made a push to more effectively help some people who deserve help. No coincidence that this is military related either, but there it is.

So if he keeps up the pace he'll have done 14 good things for ex-soldiers in the richest most powerful country in the history of mankind during his presidency. Not as GOAT as I thought at first, but still pretty GOAT.

Side note. I finally got to day 93 and it says he went to Walter Reed to hand out a Purple Heart. 'Hmmmm...it's ceremonial and all but that is sort of good.' Says to soldier who lost leg, "Congratulations on behalf of Melania, myself and the entire nation." Oops.

I think my favorite though was going to the Executive Orders signing. Giving a short speech. Walking out. Forgot to sign the Executive Orders. This is real life.

still better than if Hillary had won

She did have some emails she hosted carelessly a number of years back. But I'm not sure that stands up against the novel-length record of mean-spirited idiocy we have above us.

The first 100 days have taught me that several things I thought were hyperbolic or exaggerated last year were actually spot on. "He will take us 50 years backwards" is one such example.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I can't come up with a single statement that WAS an exaggeration. Even WW3 is in play. It's crazy.

Bump for Mat