After reading way too many stories about Trump’s first hundred days, it dawned on me that a vital angle of this analytic ritual was missing. Here’s the real question: how have the rest of us coped with 100 days of the Orangeman in the White House? Forget about how the Donald performed. None of us needed a hundred days to figure that one out. When the shock of election night hit, we knew this wasn’t going to be pretty. America had elected everyone’s crazy uncle, a creepy old cuss who says weird stuff, a guy with a 75-word vocabulary and an attention span shorter than his fingers.
Yet, Donald J. Trump, the most unlikely of presidents, has changed our lives in ways small and large, like no other political figure has. For example, people are:
• FREAKING OUT. Remember when we longed for November 9, thinking that our nightmare would finally end? It had just begun. Now we had to accept the reality that our new commander in chief was an accused sexual predator whose foreign policy promise was to “bomb the shit out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.” Understandably, the first 100 days of Trump threw most of the country into high anxiety. In an updated version of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”, you had to be nuts not to go insane over this presidency. Doctors noted a sharp increase of patients experiencing Trump-related high blood pressure, chest tightness and gastrointestinal distress. Psychotherapists in all parts of the country reported soaring caseloads of patients with severe anxiety and depression over the new White House occupant. (Here, here and here.) Many, according to one psychologist quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer, complained of “insomnia and a dark, permeating sense of fear and powerlessness.” Most large city public school systems have established hot lines and counseling services for students upset by daily Trump news, particularly those from minority, LGBT and immigrant groups.
• RESISTING. Trump has motivated more sustained protests since the Vietnam War and civil rights days of the 1960s. Folks who have never marched before are hitting the streets regularly on behalf of women, LGBT rights, science, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the disabled and a score of other issues. A week has not passed since the inauguration without numerous demonstrations. Much of the resistance’s organizing and advance work is being done by volunteers who had not been politically active before Trump. “To have a sustained (protest), every weekend, every couple of days, and it’s a different issue – I’ve never seen anything like this before,” David Meyer, a sociology professor at University of California-Irvine told CNN. The resistance even managed to launch the first protest in space last month when the Autonomous Space Agency Network floated an anti-Trump banner 90,000 feet into the stratosphere.
• LAUGHING. The Donald has given comedians their first bull market since George W. Bush and his malapropisms moved back to Texas. Alec Baldwin’s career has surged through his Saturday Night Live Trump impressions. Comedy Central hired its own presidential impersonator and launched a weekly parody. Thanks to his acerbic anti-Trump bits, Stephen Colbert rose from the ashes of the late night talk show wars to overtake Jimmy Fallon, who never overcame his pre-election tousling of Trump’s hair. Just a week ago, there was fear and trembling over a potential writers strike and what it would have meant for an anxious nation dependent on a nightly dose of presidential humor. Not to worry. With this president, comedy writers are a superfluous luxury. All these producers need is the original transcript of the president’s words. If he’s not kicking off Black History Month by referring to Fredrick Douglas in the present tense, he’s declaring that Andrew Jackson opposed the Civil War 16 years after he died. Donald Trump is his own parody. Still, when he calls North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a “smart cookie”, or invites his Philippine murderous counterpart, Rodrigo Duterte, to the White House, we’d all sleep better at night if those lines had been delivered by Alec Baldwin. Humor is more fun when it doesn’t have adverse consequences.
• CONSUMING NEWS. Despite Trump’s relentless war against the mainstream media, – or maybe because of it – there has been an unprecedented stampede for news about what this president is doing. In the three weeks after the election, the New York Times added a whopping 132,000 digital subscribers. Then, in the first quarter of 2017, it picked up another 308,000 net new subscriptions. The Washington Post has added more than 60 newsroom jobs this year, an unheard of number in this era of editorial retrenchment. At least six of those positions will be used on a “rapid response” investigative team covering Trump and national news. Television news continues to enjoy record ratings, largely due to an intense interest in what Trump is up to.
Of the 11.6 million articles written about Trump’s first 100 days, my favorite came from the distinguished dean of the conservative punditry, the Washington Post’s George F. Will. He began with: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either.” Will then makes the case that Trump has a “dangerous disability”, and needs to be quarantined. He writes: “His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”
Nothing captures the first 100 days of Trump better than that. As for the rest of us, let’s keep resisting and laughing as much as possible. There are 13.5 additional hundred-day periods left in this administration. I’m pretty sure that at the end of each of them, the lint in that disorderly mind will still be blowing in the gusting wind of factoids.