100 days in, and Trump has already failed

It only took 100 days for Trump to tank his presidency and wreck what marginal popularity he possessed. His failure to deliver on his promises means that a strong majority of Americans now oppose him.

Call it the One Hundred Days in reverse.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt found a nation in utter freefall and launched a heroic effort to save it — and to remake it as a more durable, more resilient, more just society. Donald Trump found a nation with its best economy and lowest crime rate in over 50 years, mostly at peace, and launched a diabolical effort to destroy it — and to remake it in a nightmare vision of deep economic uncertainty, ravaging incompetence and corruption, and a horrific slide toward hellish injustice, where billionaires literally own the country and do whatever they want, while innocent people are seized and exiled and imprisoned for life without ever going to court.

FDR defined what the first 100 days of a presidency can be. Trump has now shown, in only 100 days, exactly why the founders’ darkest fear was a president-turned-tyrant.

Yet we must not be despondent. We must not look at his incipient dictatorship and plutocracy and declare there is no hope — pessimistically dismissing the idea that further elections will ever happen, that the courts will play any real role in stopping him, that We the People can still rise up and rescue the Republic we have been charged to keep.

Yes, our fears are valid — but they are not fully realized yet. We still live in a nation where our leaders’ authority relies upon our continued consent, a nation in which public opinion is still paramount. Rather than dismiss our own power and declare that nothing we do or say matters, we must insist that it absolutely does.

In fact, to say otherwise is to engage in a fundamental misunderstanding of the political dynamics in America right now.

Trump prevailed in 2024 precisely because public opinion is malleable, permeable, fragile, and fickle — because enough of us (particularly independent voters) were lulled and fooled and lied to, convinced that Trump’s return would be a net benefit to their lives. People were conned.

There is, however, always a flipside to Trump’s deceptions. Yes, he has his evil powers of manipulating public opinion — but he also has virtually zero ability to deliver on his deceptive promises. He is all sales and no delivery. He has no capacity to execute. Campaigning plays to his strengths, but actually having to govern exposes all of his weaknesses. He has, as one Trump University internal memo once put it, a chronic “fulfillment problem.”

Lowering costs? Grocery costs continue to climb; housing costs continue to climb; inflation remains a problem; consumer confidence has plummeted, and business uncertainty has skyrocketed, as Trump’s tariff taxes have threatened to drive costs even higher, while also taking a wrecking ball to the stock market. And if Trump gets his way in Congress on cutting the ACA and Medicaid, the cost of healthcare for middle-class and working-class Americans will explode.

Fighting unaccountable elites? He literally kicked his own supporters out of his inauguration and filled it with multi-billionaires, then turned the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, into a super-bureaucrat, cutting government agencies that were investigating his own businesses and then awarding his own businesses with government contracts while using the power of the federal government to be a sales and marketing arm for his failing car company. Trump and his cronies are the elites — billionaires with conflicts of interest and no accountability.

Law and order? ICE is now a lawless Gestapo, rounding up not only undocumented immigrants but green-card holders and even US citizens, chaining and shackling them into the cargo holds of military planes and deporting them for lifetime imprisonment in foreign gulags without ever seeing a judge or setting foot in a courtroom. The power of the federal government has been perversely hijacked for Trump to engage in personal vendettas against law firms that represented his opponents, against universities he disagrees with politically, against journalists and media organizations who try to hold him accountable. Meanwhile our nation’s military secrets are shared on text group chats, putting our service members at fatal risk, and there are no consequences at all.

And just as has been the case with every Trump con, eventually more and more people figure out that they are not getting what they bargained for.

All presidential approval ratings inevitably succumb to gravity, but Trump’s has succumbed a lot more — and a lot more quickly.

Only 41% of Americans now approve of Trump’s presidency — and it’s a shockingly low 31% of independents. These are the lowest numbers ever for any presidency, beating out the previous low: Trump’s first term. Trump took one of the narrowest electoral wins ever and immediately drove it into the red.

It is the worst first 100 days of any presidency — and this is the easy part, the honeymoon phase, the part where an incoming president gets the benefit of the doubt from the electorate. It only gets worse from here.

Trump lied to voters. And more and more voters are now realizing this.

And yes, this still matters. Especially if we all wake up and act like it matters; and we’ll start tomorrow with how Trump’s failures show exactly how he can and will be defeated in 2026 and beyond.