Joseph Gill <gilljoseph1949@yahoo.com> wrote:2025-5-17 07:37
Email subject: A good short read ---- "The Real First 100 Days"
"The Real First 100 Days"
THE REAL FIRST 100 DAYS
COMMENTARY
By Victor Davis Hanson
[https://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/victor_davis_hanson/] -
RCP Contributo
r
May 16, 2025The Real First 100 Days
| RealClearPolitics
[https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/05/16/the_real_first_100_days_152799.html]
Supporters talk of "flooding the zone," believing President Donald
Trump is making so many changes so quickly that his opposition is
reduced to deer-in-the-headlights infancy.
They must be right when the nation suffers daily Democratic pottymouth
videos, vandalism of Teslas, infantile meltdowns at congressional
witnesses, rioting against federal agents to protect illegal alien
felons, protesting on behalf of women beaters, M-13 gangbangers, human
traffickers, and assaulters, and visa-holding violent students
praising Hamas terrorists.
In contrast, opponents either claim that Trump's first three months
are either directionless chaos or a Hitlerian nightmare or both.
But what is really happening?
One, Trump is finally addressing the problems that
proverbially "cannot go on forever, and so they won't go on." When, if
ever, would the left have closed the southern border? After 10, 30, 50
million illegal aliens? How many more criminal illegal entrants was
the Biden administration willing to allow into American neighborhoods
-- 500,000? 1 million? 3 million? How long was the world simply going
to ignore the human destruction on the doorstep of Europe?
Would former President Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala
Harris have sought a ceasefire? Or would it have taken another 1.5, 3,
or even 5 million more dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and
Russians?
Nor did past administrations ever seek a solution to the massive
national debt, much less the uncontrollable budget and trade deficits.
All prior presidents passed the day of judgment on to some vague
future presidency, assured that their money printing would at least
not blow up on their watch.
All moaned that China was piling up huge trade surpluses while denying
its own population the usual modern safety net. They knew Beijing's
aim was to use the trillions of dollars in trade surpluses to build a
new massive military, a greater arsenal of nuclear bombs, and a new
imperial Belt and Road overseas empire.
Yet no administration did anything but greenlight American outsourcing
and offshoring while ignoring Chinese trade cheating and technology
theft.
Indeed, prior presidencies appeased and enriched China on the foolish
belief that such indulgence would lead to Chinese prosperity, and with
such Western-style affluence, soon a globalized, democratic, and
supposedly friendly China.
In sum, we just witnessed all at once a 100-day, 360-degree effort to
address all the existential challenges that we knew were unsustainable
but were either afraid or incompetent to address.
Second, the administration apparently wants to confront the source of
these crises and believes it is the progressive project.
The left maintains real political power not by grass-roots popularity,
but rather by unelected institutional clout. The party of democracy
uses anti-democratic means to achieve its ends of perpetual control.
It wages lawfare through the weaponization of the state, local, and
federal courts.
It exercises executive power through cherry-picked federal district
and circuit judges and their state and local counterparts.
The permanent bureaucracies and huge federal workforce are mostly
left-wing, unionized, and weaponized by a progressive apparat. Their
supreme directive is to amalgamate legislative, judicial, and
executive power into the hands of the unelected Anthony Faucis, Jim
Comeys, and Lois Lerners of the world -- and thus to override or
ignore both popular plebiscites and the work of the elected Congress.
Over 90 percent of the media -- legacy, network, social, and state --
are left-wing. Their mission is not objectivity but, admittedly,
indoctrination.
Academia is the font of the progressive project. Ninety percent of the
professoriate are left-wing and activist -- explaining why campuses
believe they are above the rules and laws of the Constitution, the
Supreme Court, and the U.S. Congress.
Add into the mix the blue-chip Accela corridor law firms and the
globalized corporate and revolving-door political elite.
The net result is clear: Almost everything the vast majority of
Americans and their elected representatives did not want -- far-left
higher education, a Pravda media, biological men destroying women's
sports, an open border, 30 million illegal aliens, massive debt, a
weaponized legal system, and a politicized Pentagon -- became the new
culture of America.
So, Trump is not just confronting unaddressed existential crises but
also the root causes of why, when, and how they become inevitable and
nearly unsolvable.
His answer is a messy, knock-down-drag-out counterrevolution to reboot
the country back to the middle where it once was and where the
Founders believed it should remain.
His right and left opponents call such pushback chaotic, disruptive,
and out of control.
But the counterrevolution appears disorderly and upsetting, mostly to
those who originally birthed the chaos; it certainly does not to the
majority of Americans who finally wanted an end to the madness.
(C)2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
_Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Case for
Trump." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com._
[The Real First 100 Days]
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Pundits are confused about what to make of the first 100 days of the
second Trump administration.
Supporters talk of "flooding the zone," believing President Donald
Trump is making so many changes so quickly that his opposition is
reduced to deer-in-the-headlights infancy.
They must be right when the nation suffers daily Democratic pottymouth
videos, vandalism of Teslas, infantile meltdowns at congressional
witnesses, rioting against federal agents to protect illegal alien
felons, protesting on behalf of women beaters, M-13 gangbangers, human
traffickers, and assaulters, and visa-holding violent students
praising Hamas terrorists.
In contrast, opponents either claim that Trump's first three months
are either directionless chaos or a Hitlerian nightmare or both
(C)2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
_Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Case for
Trump." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com._
