first one hundred days

The First One Hundred Days is a Meaningless Metric

The first one hundred days of a new president’s presidency is a media gimmick created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. I’ll skip right to the important part: It was a crock of shit then and it’s an even bigger crock of shit now. It’s an artifice meant to distract from more important things, such as the fact that the effects of policy-making often do not become evident until long after they are implemented.

It took years for the deregulation of craft brewing to reap dividends and when it did Reagan’s economy took credit while Carter pounded sand. Like many (maybe most) bad ideas, NAFTA seemed like a good one at the time. The War on Drugs was supposed to usher in a utopia of peaceful streets and whole families; some forty years later it is an obvious failure built on lies. The point is, setting policy – good or bad – is a process, not an event. Roosevelt’s media gimmick is a snapshot of a bigger picture with implications reaching far beyond a span of four or eight years, never mind one hundred days. As a metric of a president’s success, it’s essentially meaningless.

A short-sighted society that demands instant gratification won’t care too much for the idea of waiting ten, or five, or even two years for any particular policy to either bear fruit or go balls up. Depending on who you ask, one hundred days is too long a time to wait and congress should already be moving forward with impeachment proceedings against President Trump for… Something. And if they (the Left) can’t impeach him (they won’t) they’ll do whatever they can to subvert his presidency and ruin the lives and reputations of his loyalists.

The first one hundred days says a lot less about President Trump than it does about his detractors. After their humiliating loss in November, the Left has fixated itself upon revenge and it’s not only President Trump they’re targeting. It’s everyone who voted for him. More than that, it’s the whole country they want to punish. That’s why they welcome from third world nations immigrants and refugees who hate our country and are eager to enrich themselves by it. Maybe it’s why they prefer the idea of socialist breadlines over free enterprise; they’d rather all of us be worse off instead of some us being better off. They’d rather President Trump fail and take the United States down with him. It’s a sadomasochistic reflex that allows the Left to tolerate pain as long as the Right is suffering from it too.

Whatever their reasons, the Left is hurt and afraid and they’re lashing out on several fronts. Activist judges like Obama donor and appointee William Orrick are undermining President Trump’s agenda from the bench. The deep state is still working behind the scenes to subvert the rule of law and destabilize a legitimate President. The Democratic Party is in a state of leaderless conniption fits and can only obstruct even if they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. They don’t want to negotiate. They want everything they want and they want it now and we get nothing. And if they can’t have it then no one can, just ask any Antifa, who wants more government and calls himself an anarchist and anti-fascist while re-enacting Kristallnacht in Berkeley.

No, the first one hundred days of President Trump’s first term have been a bonanza of deregulation and taking power away from the federal government and restoring it to the people. Just yesterday he ordered a review of federal education policies, the aim of which is to curtail government overreach. And as of now, he has signed more legislation than any president before him in the first one hundred days. We may not feel the effects of the legislation and deregulation for some time but the point is he did it. He set the record. He’s working, let him work, let’s be patient and see how this plays out.

And of course, the Left’s immediate reaction is to dismiss this new record the way Politifact did when Lauren Carroll wrote:

“Trump has signed 28 bills so far. Spicer’s correct that this is more than every president going back about 70 years.

However, this isn’t a perfect measure — primarily because not all bills are created equal. None of the bills Trump has signed into law are particularly significant.”

Nothing the president will ever do will ever be good enough for the Left. It doesn’t matter if it’s within the first one hundred days or one term or eight years. Liberals are malcontents with an uncompromising, all-or-nothing attitude and would prefer to burn the whole thing down instead of seeing it succeed under the leadership of a man they detest. They demand instant gratification and they have short attention spans. And worst of all, they’re only happy when they’re miserable and they subscribe to the notion that misery loves company and they will have company.

What would these people do without something to bitch and moan about? They’d be miserable but not satisfied by it the way they are now with tantrums to throw and people to hate and a president to undermine. The mainstream media continues to feed them fake news to create an illusion of a failing presidency but the truth is, President Trump is keeping his promises as best he can and he’s doing the job. He’s bringing Trudeau and Nieto to heel, he and Xi Jinping are getting along well, and he’s finally working to fix the North Korea problem. He’s in charge and he’s acting like it. Compare that to the Left: an increasingly violent, leaderless, gender-bending freakshow in a state of full-blown meltdown and self-imposed alienation.

The past one hundred days has revealed more about their true nature than it has any transgression on the part of the president. The revelation isn’t pleasant and it’s not getting any better. Time heals all wounds is something you scribble in a diary or tell your best friend during a divorce. It doesn’t work like that in politics. Ideological divides last far longer than one hundred days or one president and they only become wider.

And that, dear readers, is why the first one hundred days is, has been, and forever will be, a crock of shit.

By day, Michael Rodgers is a logistics specialist in the aerospace industry. By night, he is an Associate Editor for the Liberty Conservative. He lives and drinks profusely in Dover, New Hampshire.

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