Adam Gibbs: Point
The start of a Golden Age
President Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in office have been a whirlwind of action and change not seen in Washington in decades. The president won a decisive Electoral College victory in November to carry out his campaign promises of securing our southern border, repairing our economy and ending the radical policies of the last four years. For 100 days now, he has been doing precisely that — and at a blistering pace.
And voters have had a favorable view of the president, who is doing what he said he would do, showing that the post-election honeymoon will stretch beyond the first 100 days.
Trump gets the highest marks with voters for securing the southern border. From record highs under President Joe Biden, border crossings have nearly vanished, as would-be illegal immigrants know that we now have a president who will carry out his constitutional duty to enforce the law. As the president said in his speech to Congress, it didn’t take more laws to fix the border — it just took a different president.
Americans suffered greatly from the cost-of-living crisis under Biden. While four years of harm cannot be fully reversed in 100 days, Trump has embarked on the most ambitious deregulatory agenda of any president in history, pledging to cut 10 regulations for every new regulation put in place. This will dramatically reduce the costs of gas, groceries and housing for families and significantly reduce the compliance burden on small businesses and the economy.
The administration’s adoption of minimal necessary regulation and an abundance-minded approach to energy production will help achieve voters’ demands to reduce inflation and bring jobs back to our country. Additionally, Trump’s forceful termination of the Biden administration’s era of crushing over-regulation has sent a powerful, positive signal to the business community to plan and invest freely and abundantly.
In 100 days in office, Trump has already achieved something that every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan promised to do: He has dismantled the federal Department of Education. Some core functions of the department have been distributed to other agencies, awaiting necessary congressional action. Still, Trump already defunded the teaching of critical race theory in our schools, dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy, and threatened the tax exemptions of schools that fail to protect the civil rights of Jewish students or that violate the Supreme Court’s ruling ending affirmative action. At a time when higher education has lost prestige and enrollment, this is precisely what our education system needs.
Trump has also appointed an all-star team, putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services and Brooke Rollins at the Department of Agriculture with a mission to Make America Healthy Again. They are off to a running start, banning harmful food additives and working to cut off taxpayer funding for the soda and junk foods that are so often used in welfare fraud and contribute to America’s crisis of obesity and chronic disease.
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has aggressively trimmed down foreign aid, reduced the size of the federal workforce and brought business-world efficiencies to the bureaucracy. Adviser Elon Musk has exposed endemic wasteful, foolish and even potentially corrupt spending across various federal agencies.
Trump has taken on the mighty federal employees union, which even Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed, and his Schedule F order is making thousands of federal employees accountable to elected officials for the first time in decades.
While the first 100 days of this administration have been historic, if Congress doesn’t lock the Trump agenda into law, it will be easily undone by future presidents. Trump has spent 100 days taking executive action; now he needs Congress to turn those orders into bills that he can sign to ensure that his first 100 days launch America into its next Golden Age.
Adam Gibbs is the communications director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Don Kusler: Counterpoint
A MAGA mess
As we quickly approach the 100-day mark of the second Donald Trump presidency, let us look at what has happened.
A lawless authoritarian blitz is a good summary. Maybe a MAGA mess?
Let’s review some of the lowlights by checking in on some predictions and questions that I asked after Trump’s election in November.
Will Trump, who seems to serve only his interests, unravel legal issues that he has faced and begin using the Justice Department to go after political opponents and serve his personal grievances? In short, yes.
Through executive orders, the appointment of a pliable loyalist in Pam Bondi as attorney general, and the resulting vacating of legal cases and the ouster of dozens of career U.S. attorneys, Trump is well on his way to doing precisely what he and his followers decried so often. That would be weaponizing the Justice Department and legal system.
Threatening law firms that do business with his perceived enemies, openly criticizing and belittling judges who have stopped his often illegal actions, and getting the Justice Department to drop cases that don’t fit his views, no matter the legal merits, are but a few of the examples of wholesale weaponization in his name.
And the vast majority of these actions are blatantly unconstitutional and illegal.
Will Trump inflame culture wars with his early actions? Yes, again.
For example: Attempts at mass deportation, blackmailing universities considered to be too liberal, shredding anything considered to have a perceived connection to diversity, equity and inclusion, and continuing to attack LGBTQ rights using the Trumped-up issue of transgender athletes.
Again, the vast majority of these actions face valid legal challenges because they are part of a lawless authoritarian blitz.
Will Trump continue coddling and imitating the world’s worst dictators and drag U.S. foreign policy into an unimaginable abyss? Well, that’s a yes, too.
A constant stream of adoring comments about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, among other authoritarians, destroying the U.S. global leadership role through a series of actions against longtime allies and casting a vast shadow over the global economy with his on-again, off-again tariffs.
Something I, for some inexplicable reason, did not see coming was the Elon Musk-led incoherent mass firing of government employees and agency takeovers. This decidedly and dangerously inefficient exercise is being carried out in the name of, ironically, government efficiency; it has repeatedly had its actions reversed and has served as a flash point of anger for voters.
Of course, this list of items is but a fraction of the carnage that Trump is bringing to the United States and the world through his self-serving, petty and lawless rampage.
Legal challenges are holding up many of these actions, and the American people are starting to pay attention.
Sadly, each day brings another blitz of lawless authoritarian actions.
Chaos is not a strategy for success. Glaring incompetence and inexperience among federal agency leadership is not Making America Great Again. Using executive orders and the Justice Department to go after “enemies” is not ending the imaginary political weaponization of government but, instead, making it real.
The first 100 days have been a lawless, authoritarian mess.
Don Kusler is the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, the nation’s most experienced progressive advocacy organization. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
