One hundred days? In some ways, it feels as though we are 100 years away from the Joe Biden presidency. In others, it feels as though the new administration and Congress have barely gotten started. And for some, it feels as though they haven’t changed a bit.
Donald Trump took the oath of office exactly 100 days ago, and wasted no time changing course for America’s executive branch. His first 24 hours were filled with executive orders, appointments, and ongoing access to the media — a distinct difference from his predecessor, who barely interacted with the press at all. One might believe the media would be inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt in recognition of all the access they regained to the Leader of the Free World.
One would be wrong. But we’ll get to that in a second.
Let’s look at the high points of the first 100 days. Trump closed the border in six weeks, not with new legislation as Biden and Kamala Harris demanded, but simply by using the authority they refused to exercise. Trump began rounding up criminal illegal aliens and deporting them as fast as possible. He named Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization and then delivered the first indictment on that basis last week.
Democrats under Joe Biden spent 1,461 days doing nothing about immigration enforcement, except to encourage mass migration sotto voce for the entire four years. And Democrats are still siding with criminal illegal aliens over enforcing the law.
In nearly every corner of the federal government, Trump has people focused on real reform and overhaul. Trump also promised to identify and cut wasteful programs, overhaul the federal bureaucracy, and put America on a better fiscal path. Trump and Elon Musk have frozen nearly a half-trllion dollars in spending in the first 100 days, an amazing feat that most presidents don’t do with four years to work. Marco Rubio is dismantling the USAID-NGO funding pipeline that spends nearly all of its money in the US and mainly on progressive activism.
Not everything has worked out as planned, however. Trump still hasn’t come up with a coherent plan for his tariffs, or even a coherent goal. That will take longer to develop, but it has already cost Trump an opportunity to get a friendlier government in Canada. The war in Ukraine still rages, despite Trump’s efforts to impose a peace on Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Congress hasn’t kept up either, forcing Trump to rely on EOs, although NBC shifts the blame the other way:
President Donald Trump has leaned heavily on executive power to remake the federal government at the outset of his new administration, largely leaving Congress on the sidelines.
Instead of relying on members of the Republican-controlled House and Senate to pass laws to give him new authorities, Trump has sought to bypass Congress by invoking or repurposing existing laws to carry out his agenda since taking office in January. And he’s received widespread support from his party on Capitol Hill, with Democrats mostly powerless to rein him in.
Trump has so far signed just five bills into law — fewer than any president in the first 100 days of an administration since at least Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, according to an NBC News analysis of data in the congressional record. By this time during his first term, Trump had signed 30 bills into law. In their first 100 days, Barack Obama had enacted 14 bills and Joe Biden had signed 11.
Ahem. This metric measures Congress, not the presidency, especially since Trump hasn’t spent his time vetoing any bills. Trump does not have the authority to order Congress to pass laws. If Trump has only signed five bills, that’s because Congress isn’t doing their job, not because Trump prefers to rely on executive authority. (Name me a modern president who didn’t prefer that.)
And that brings me to what hasn’t changed at all — the Protection Racket Media. Not only do they still cover Trump as a quasi-illegitimate president, they still won’t come clean about their own complicity in the worst presidential cover-up in a century. Instead, reporters are cashing in on the Now It Can Be Told literary genre with books and reportage that carefully elides their own role in covering up Joe Biden’s dementia. Stephen L. Miller hits the nail on the head:
When it comes to the many forthcoming books about President Joe Biden’s decline, only one question matters: what role did the national news media play in assisting his White House in the cover-up? It’s a question that, if early snippets and sample releases are anything to go by, will remain largely ignored by the authors and their colleagues in media.
A number of reporters are releasing volumes about Biden’s conspicuous cognitive decline, that many of them supposedly only became aware of on the debate stage last June. Many of these journalists actively worked to smear anyone who had noticed the former president’s state of mind, including right-leaning commentators and Republicans, as far back as 2021.
Instead, as Glenn Reynolds points out, they nearly dislocated their shoulders in attempting to pat themselves on the back for this coverage at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
But journalists didn’t “miss” the story. They lied about it.
They chose not to cover what Americans could see with their own eyes.
And they did so for political reasons: to help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
Then, when Biden was obviously toast, they pivoted to claims that the formerly hopeless Harris was presidential timber, as well as “joyful” and “brat.” Puhleez.
A healthy country’s political nervous system would tell us when our president is mentally incompetent. Instead, we had one that smothered the truth.
The Protection Racket Media will never change. Rather than report on Trump honestly, they continue to promote panic and misreport without regard to accountability. Remember “Black Monday” on the stock markets this month? No, because it never materialized. The same media that told us that Joe Biden’s cognitive (and literal) stumbles were caused by a childhood stutter or were “cheap fakes” now profess perfect vision and predict calamities rather than just wait for events to unfold. Every court fight is now a “constitutional crisis”; every deportation is a sign of tyranny and authoritarianism.
They’re selling fear, not reporting the news. Why? Because they are not reporters. They are propagandists.
And their performance over these 100 days shows that they have not learned a single thing … or inclined to learn or even listen. Instead, they’re selling books that expose their own corruption.
This is why we need to maintain independent platforms and voices. The Protection Racket Media will never hold itself accountable for their failures and worse. They will continue to blame everyone but themselves for their credibility collapse, and describe independent journalists as “freaks.”
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