ANGELO LYNN

The headlines of the past week tell the story.

“100 Days. That’s All It Took to Sever America From the World.” “A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency, according to 35 Legal Scholars.” “American Values Are Threatened by the American President.” “Why Trump’s Economic Disruption Will Be Hard to Reverse.” “Bracing for a Slow-Moving, Self-Inflicted Economic Storm.” “Trump Is Laying a Potentially Deadly Trap for the U.S. Auto Industry.” “Deporting Americans?” “Trump Refuses to Fold a Losing Hand… Doubling down with a pair of deuces is not a winning strategy.” “The world — politely — tells Trump to take a hike.”

You get the idea.

He’s running the country just like he ran his casinos — into an economic nosedive. As Jennifer Rubin, of the Contrarian, says in a wrap of one of her recent columns, “it’s becoming increasingly easy to understand how he bankrupted all those casinos.” (In case you forgot, Trump’s history is laden with business failures — six bankruptcies. (It wasn’t until the unlikely success of the reality show “The Apprentice” that he found what he was good at… being a mean-spirited showman.)

More recently, Trump has been successful at scamming the Republican Party and his MAGA followers into believing he had a clue about anything other than selling a false narrative — and, to that end, he’s milked them out of tens of millions of campaign contributions, sold them commercial trinkets and near-worthless meme coins and will likely leave office with millions of ill-gotten gains by profiting off of the presidency. That such subterfuge has belittled the office of the presidency to a third-rate dictatorial government is of no concern to Trump or, it appears, any GOP leader. And that Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image may be a more ominous omen than many imagined just 100 days ago.

For another perspective on Trump’s first 100 days, dozens of recent charts shed more detail on the facts. Here’s a sampling:

• He’s issued more executive orders than any other modern president. About 150, so far, which more than tripled his first-term orders, and outdid FDR who had issued just over 60 in 1937 and a tad over 100 in 1941, but then FDR was hugely successful in getting the nation out of the Great Depression and passing lasting legislation that created the New Deal while also forging the greatest peacetime international alliances the world has seen. Arguably, Trump’s actions have done the opposite.

• Trump’s also been sued more than any other president. That’s because Trump’s most controversial executive orders have been an abuse of power and have sparked lawsuits working their way through the courts. So far, Trump has lost most of those weighed by judges. In the one case that made it to the Supreme Court, they ruled against him 9-0. Not wanting to accept defeat, he claimed a win anyway.

• Markets have plunged faster than ever. Trump took office with the headwinds of an economic juggernaut that led the world in growth and vibrancy. With inflation under control (just under 3%) by the time Trump took office, it was the envy of the world. No longer. Trump’s climate of uncertainty, acts of illegality, outrageous tariffs and a poorly conceive trade war sent the stock market down almost 20%, at one point and has settled around 8% down since Inauguration Day. It’s the worst stock market performance in this period of a presidency since Republican Gerald Ford in 1974 (and that’s unfair to Ford, only because he took over from the disgraced Republican President Richard Nixon who resigned, rather than be impeached, the year prior.)

• Trump’s popularity has fallen faster than any recent president as well. 100 days ago, he had the good will of 52% of the country; today, it’s 42% with a majority giving Trump a thumbs down on every issue except border security — and even there a majority of Americans don’t approve of how Trump is handling immigration.

There’s far more information to glean from the various charts in the news (almost all about the decline of America’s economy or world status), but let’s switch focus to the broader perspective. Just what does Trump’s first 100 days represent?

Columnist Jamelle Bouie said it well when he noted that most presidents cast their first 100 days around what they can create. For Biden it was his infrastructure plan, passed with bipartisan support, that set out to rekindle the nation’s manufacturing prowess in green energy, AI, high tech, chip manufacturing, as well as rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and other state and local infrastructure — plus a lot more. Trump, on the other hand, has changed the country through the destruction of much of what has made America great. That destruction, Bouie writes, has cost him.

“Yes, Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans. If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure.”

And here’s Maureen Dowd reflecting on what has surprised her about Trump’s start to his second term: “I think the irony of Trump’s first 100 days is that he’s always presented himself as this brand expert. He slapped his name on half of New York, but he has taken the greatest brand in the history of the world, which is the United States, and destroyed it in 100 days. And he’s well on his way to destroying the brand of our dollar.”

It’s going to get worse, Dowd says, for the country and Trump: “When people begin to realize that their Veterans Affairs office has been closed, or when DOGE is messing with Social Security and Medicare, when it filters down to them, which it’s going to do really fast — it’s cliché to say he’s like the Wizard of Oz, but the curtain is opening. Toto is opening the curtain and you’re just seeing that this is a con man with a lame con.”

All of which reflects back on an aspect of the American voter — the desire to believe the snake-oil salesman, the miracle weight-loss drug, the handy-dandy gadget that does everything for you for only $49.95 (but hurry the deal ends at midnight), that wonderful old movie The Rainmaker, or the candidate who boasts he’ll solve the Ukraine-Russian war on Day 1, the economy is going to be SO GREAT when he’s elected, countries will be down on one knee to us, and every American is going to be SO RICH because, well, he’s the miracle-man.

It’s appalling so many Americans fell for the scam.

Angelo Lynn