Trump 2.0 at 100 Days | Big Boats

We’ve hit the 100-day mark for Trump 2.0, and I’m exhausted. Never before has a president done so much on his own so quickly: President Trump’s 143 executive orders far surpass any other president in the first 100 days (FDR is a distant second with 99 EOs) and is only about 10 percent less than the total number of EOs President Biden issued in four years.

It's tough enough keeping up with all of those executive orders, but because so many of them are of questionable legality/constitutionality, there are also a bumper crop of lawsuits challenging the administration’s actions – 222 at last count.

Then there’s all the lying. It seems wrong to simply let slide false or misleading statements from the President of the United States, but when there are so many of them multiplying so rapidly it’s hard to keep pace. If you follow and discuss politics for a living (which I do) Donald Trump has almost certainly forced you to do some serious triage. How much time should I spend decrying Trump’s clearly false claim that Abrego Garcia has ‘MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles based on some obviously Photoshopped picture someone showed him? Then there’s the bald-faced lie that countries are ‘emptying their prisons’ and sending their worst criminals to ‘invade’ the US from the southern border. I could go on (and on, and on) but at some point it’s just too much. We’ve never had a president with less regard for the truth than Donald J. Trump.

It may not even be fair to call Donald Trump a liar, which suggests that he has some sense of what truth is and knows he’s subverting it. Donald Trump is a bullshitter – a person to whom truth or falsity is essentially irrelevant. What matters to the bullshitter is telling the story that best serves their ends. (The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has a fantastic little book on this called On Bullshit.)

It’s a brilliant, if disturbing, move. By lying like hell, Donald Trump has exhausted the fact-checkers, caused much of the public to shrug when yet another Trump lie is pointed out, and – most damaging – led plenty of people to give Trump even more latitude by taking him ‘seriously but not literally’. When the President tells so many lies that ‘not taking him literally’ is offered as serious advice, the Republic is in trouble.

But while Donald Trump can fool some of the people all of the time, more and more of the non-MAGA public are catching on to the con. No president since the beginning of scientific polling in the 1930s has been more unpopular at the 100-day mark than Donald Trump. Polling averages put his approval at around 43% and dropping, with the only other presidents below 50% after their first 100 days being George W. Bush (47%), Gerald Ford (48%), and Richard Nixon (48%). I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the only four presidents with underwater approval ratings at 100 days have been Republicans. Trump claims that all of these polls are fake (or, in Trump terms, FAKE!) and that the polling organizations are Negative Criminals (as opposed to positive criminals?) who are TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! But weirdly, Trump adds, “I wish them well”.

Donald Trump likes to claim that he won a sweeping victory in 2024 and, as such, has a clear mandate to do all of the things that are making him so unpopular (if you believe in those FAKE NEWS polls, that is). After losing the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, getting 1.48% more of the popular vote than Kamala Harris might have felt like a blowout win to Trump. But it’s not anywhere close to Barack Obama’s decisive win in 2008 (7.27% popular vote margin), Bill Clinton in 1996 (8.51%), and a world apart from Ronald Reagan’s jaw-dropping 18.21% win over Walter Mondale in 1984. (Mondale won his home state of Minnesota and DC. That’s it, and though I’ve known this for decades, it still blows my mind.)

While these first 100 days have been mostly awful, I’m feeling reasonably optimistic (as long as I don’t look at my 401k). Donald Trump is a bully, and while he’d like to believe that the President of the United States can bully anyone, it’s now very clear that he can’t bully the markets. Picking a fight with economic reality doesn’t go well for anyone, no matter how powerful they are. And because Donald Trump absolutely loathes backing down, he’s likely to continue his fights with reality long after a less deluded person would have realized the futility of their path.

Almost no Congressional Republicans have the stomach to challenge Trump, and I don’t expect that to change unless things get so bad that he starts to threaten their political prospects. But at present, the thought of Trump going after them publicly, with Elon Musk potentially helping out by funding a primary challenge, is scarier than what they’re seeing in the polls or economic numbers.

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For the past few months, Kimberly and I have been watching a new show called Doctor Odyssey, about a doctor on a cruise ship. It’s not very good, but I like Joshua Jackson, the lead character, and Don Johnson, who has a smaller role as the captain of the ship. We hung in there for a while, but it quickly turned into an eye-rollingly ridiculous soap opera, at which point we abandoned it. At about the same time we started watching The Good Ship Murder, about a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where someone always ends up dead. It’s also not very good, but better than Doctor Odyssey.

All of this got me thinking about the original cruise ship show: The Love Boat, which ran from 1977 – 1986. This was also not a good show, but it was from an era when most TV was pretty bad. I couldn’t resist the urge to revisit the show, or at least the opening theme. (Bad, but incredibly catchy.) One thing I noticed was how dinky the Pacific Princess (the eponymous Love Boat) seemed to be compared to the ships on those other shows and the mega-monster ships on all those cruise commercials. I asked GPT to put together a picture of the Pacific Princess next to the largest current cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas, and it gave me this:

I don’t know if GPT got the respective sizes correct, but it looks about right based on the size data. The Icon of the Seas is roughly twice as long as the Pacific Princess and is eight times larger in gross tonnage, carrying from seven to ten times more passengers.

I have almost no desire to go on a cruise, but the sheer magnitude of today’s largest ships exerts a certain pull on me. They remind me of Las Vegas -I’ve never been, can’t imagine I’d like it, but feel like I should visit simply to experience the spectacle.