David Michael Miller
Every respectable news outlet has done it, so why should Isthmus be any different?
First you note how totally arbitrary and stupid the “First 100 Days” test is for any president. Then you proceed to analyze his first three months in office in minute detail.
Actually, I won’t bother with the minute detail. I’ll just go to the big picture. It’s safe to say that the three words strung together, President Donald Trump, are enough to turn the stomach of every Madison liberal and spur them to their cardboard and markers, to get them knitting funny hats and trying to come up with new words that rhyme with “ho.”
Let’s just stipulate that Trump is the worst president in our lifetimes, modern times and possibly in the history of the republic. No clear-thinking person is happy about this except maybe the descendants of James Buchanan, previously voted by historians the worst American president ever.
But there’s reason to be happy. No, there really is. Our system of government just handled the biggest stress test it has taken in a century and it has come out okay.
Think back to Inauguration Day. There were those of us who wondered out loud if our system of western liberal democracy could survive Trump. Personally, I thought the next move would be for Russia to stage an international crisis of some kind, creating the political space for Trump to impose some form of martial law.
Still, I wrote at the time that I thought the system of checks and balances created by the namesake of our city, James Madison, and the other founders, combined with the entrenched inertia of bureaucracy, would save the day. I think I was sort of right about that, but there was a third factor I hadn’t counted on: incompetence.
After 100 days and then some, the idea that Trump and his team of misfit toys could pull off a phony international crisis in coordination with the Kremlin is laughable. These guys couldn’t even properly execute Trump’s travel ban, an area where presidents have wide discretion to act unless they go way out of their way to mess it up. Trump went to the moon to mess it up.
The Muslim travel ban (let’s be honest, that’s what it was) debacle followed by the health care debacle followed by the Mexican wall debacle followed by the position-of-the-week with regard to China, Russia, Syria and North Korea all lead sensible people to conclude that this guy is still dangerous, but dangerous in the way Peter Sellers’ character was in Dr. Strangelove, or maybe Julia Louis Dreyfus in Veep.
Take the nukes out of the equation, and it’s comedy of a high art.
So, what his first 100 days have demonstrated is that Trump is incapable of destroying our durable democracy. And, since he has actually now installed some not-crazy people in our national security apparatus, I’m reasonably confident he won’t start a nuclear war (how’s that for a low bar?).
But unless something can be proved regarding collaboration with the Russians on the election, Trump will not be impeached. And so we’re stuck with him for another 1,300 days or so.
We can take a moment to thank James Madison and the Peter Principle, but the real question is how to repair a national cultural fabric that is so torn up. The deepest problem we face is not Trump himself, but what he represents: the fact that we’ve all gone to our corners and dug in. The political middle has become a no-man’s land where politicians (and friends and neighbors) go to be torn to pieces by partisan machine gun fire.
Righteous anger on the left is not working to bring the country together, but it also doesn’t appear to be working to win elections. As Nicholas Kristof points out in a column this week, at least one poll shows Trump winning again if the election were held today and this time in both the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. And Trump voters are unmoved by what seems to those of us who didn’t vote for him as one betrayal after another.
I know this is a pill that’s hard for us to swallow, but all those protests and Indivisible chapter meetings seem to be having zero effect on doing what’s necessary in the real world of politics: winning back some share of blue-collar voters.
Because the great project right now isn’t about resisting Trump (he’s messing things up for his own agenda perfectly well, thank you very much), and it isn’t even about defeating Trump at the next election (I actually think that next time the big blue demographic glacier will roll over the competition). What liberal Americans, genuinely concerned about their country and their state, might want to do right now is figure out how to get out of their trenches and reclaim the mortar-scarred middle of American politics.
