A Shameful first Hundred Days.

Newt Gingrich once said “The first 100 days is a ridiculous concept. The fact is that nothing much happens in the first 100 days. But we've got to talk about something, so we talk about the first 100 days." Contrary to Gingrich’s remarks, Donald Trump’s first 100-days have been consequential indeed.

In the first 100 days, Trump has signed only five insignificant bills into law, virtually ignoring Congress despite its being controlled by his party. He has attacked the judiciary at every turn, including the recent arrest by FBI agents of a Milwaukee judge in her courtroom. No fan of equal branches of government, Trump’s Executive Branch is seeking to impose his will on the other supposedly co-equal branches. During the same period, he engaged in a disastrous trade war resulting in $11 million in stock market losses (as of the writing of this article in late April). He has abandoned our ally, Ukraine, causing “Washington Post” columnist Dana Milbank to write that “Trump is proposing the most odious appeasement in Europe since Neville Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland. He is demanding Ukraine surrender the 20 percent of its country, including Crimea, that Vladimir Putin has seized and abandon any hope of joining NATO.” He and his Vice President, J.D. Vance, have alienated our NATO allies. He has insulted our Canadian and Mexican neighbors by slapping 25% tariffs on them and threatened to seize Greenland by force. His executive orders have been overturned by over one hundred judges. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an Act last utilized during World War II, to justify deporting undocumented persons without due process, He has defied a judge’s order as well as the Supreme Court by deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia without due process. He has deported young American citizens, including a four-year old with cancer, some of whose mothers were breast-feeding.

His “oversight” of the Executive Branch itself has been an unmitigated disaster. He announced early on that one of his primary goals was to seek retribution against those in the Executive Branch that he perceived to have harmed him in the past. He has fired tens of thousands of federal employees, shuttered USAID, ending its life saving activities around the world and abandoning the use of soft power, fired IRS agents during tax season, and appointed historically inept Cabinet officials, including Pete Hegseth who invited a journalist to a chat on Signal about secretive attack plans against the Houthis as well as shared another Signal chat with his wife and brother. He has fired 17 inspectors generals, virtually guaranteeing corruption in the federal agencies they oversaw. He has unleashed the former heroin addict and vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on our nation’s health system, who has been indifferent to a measles outbreak on his watch. He has allowed Kristi Noem to grandstand in front of an El Salvadoran prison wearing a $50,000 watch as part of a made-for-television stunt. He has threatened our top universities with the cutting of funding for essential life-saving medical research. He has fired lawyers with the DOJ who brought criminal prosecutions against him personally and ordered DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs for the “crime” of denying that the 2020 election was stolen. Almost half of the lawyers in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division have left due to Trump’s priorities of prosecuting so-called anti-Christian bias, ending “weaponization of the law against conservatives,” and prohibiting DEI, rather than what this heralded division once did, which was to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws. He has demonized transgender people by attacking the miniscule number of trans athletes who participated in women’s sports and thereafter threatened to withhold funds from Maine. Of this historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University says that “It’s not hyperbole to say this is the weirdest 100 days of any president in American history…because, at its root, it is pathological narcissism.”

The litany of horrors is not the worst of it. Pundits have observed “this is not who we are,” yet it is clear that Trump is seeking to reshape our national image. The most profound thing Trump has done that will have long lasting impact is that he has redefined who we are as a people, creating an unrecognizable story of America. Arnold Toynbee once said that "nations, like individuals, are molded by their history and their habits." Ronald Reagan famously said that “America is, and always will be, a shining City on a Hill.” This was a phrase borrowed from pastor John Winthrop, who used it to describe his hope that God would shine his light on the Massachusetts colony.

What has Donald Trump done to our sense of who we are, to our national narrative? Are we still the shining City on a Hill? In his first days Trump has sullied that image of American exceptionalism by redefining us. Whereas we fought a Civil War to abolish slavery and breathe life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “All Men are Created Equal,” Donald Trump has put the full weight of his administration into making sure that white males, particularly those who make up the oligarchy, are raised up while everyone else is diminished. He has virtually outlawed the accurate teaching of history in our schools and museums. He seeks to bury the story of how indigenous persons had their land seized from them in the early days of our Republic. He wants to rewrite the narrative of slavery so that slaves’ lives appear to have been improved through their enslavement. He wants to prohibit our schools from teaching the story of what occurred after the Civil War, erasing from history the story of convict leasing whereby former slaves were arrested and jailed and “leased” to former plantation owners. He wants to erase the lynching of over 4,400 Black persons between Reconstruction and World War II, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. He is demanding that public schools no longer teach that for one hundred years after the Civil War, white America kept Black Americans from voting. He and his administration are now withholding funds from schools, universities, and nonprofits under the rubric of “DEI” so that American children are deprived of knowing where they came from and who they are. He is taking the axe to the Smithsonian’s African American Museum because of how they are telling the accurate story of slavery. He has ordered the Interior Secretary to look at whether memorials and statues "have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology." One can imagine that Lost Cause memorials, many of them taken down after George Floyd, will be restored throughout the South. Alan Spears, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, stated that "Every American who cares about our country's history should be worried about what people, places, and themes disappear next."

I was born in the 1940s. I grew up in the 1950s, thrilled by a narrative that the “Greatest Generation,” our fathers and mothers, defeated the fascism of Nazi Germany and had kept the Soviet Union from overrunning Eastern Europe. We were the leader of the free world. We welcomed immigrants to our land, people yearning to be free. At least that was the story we told ourselves. We were guided by values and principles that were envied by the rest of the world.

But we have now lost our way. We are led by a transactional president who perceives himself to be the Sun King, a leader striding through history and having his way with allies and enemies alike. He has been president for only 100 days, but he has done untold damage to the image of America at home and abroad.

Alexis de Tocqueville once said that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults." How we now resist Trump’s efforts to redefine us and repair our faults is the next chapter in our story.

Ernie Lewis

Retired Public Defender