Littwin: The first 100 days were horrible, but the next 100 days are bound to be even worse
Columnist Mike Littwin writes that Trump's next 100 days could be even worse as he turns his attention to threatening so-called sanctuary cities.
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The verdict is in on Donald Trump’s first 100 days of his second term:
It’s either the worst first 100 days for any president since there have been presidents or it’s the worst first 100 days for any president who will ever be president, if we get to keep electing presidents, that is.
It’s more than a disaster. It’s worse than 100 days of ineptitude. It’s all the worst Trumpian anti-democratic, anti-rule-of-law, anti-humanist, pro-corruption, pro-cruelty, pro-authoritarian impulses come to life in a fever dream that, I’m guessing, has already set our country back at least a generation.
I could list all that has gone wrong, but even here in the limitless boundaries of cyberspace, there isn’t enough room. Although I should mention on the Trump-as-dictator front, he issued 144 executive orders in his first 100 days while his all-but-ignored Republican Congress passed only five bills into law. Both are modern records.
But what’s past is past — although many of the crises, like Ukraine and Gaza and tariffs and Elon Musk’s terrorization of federal agencies, just to name a few, persist. Now it’s time to focus on the next 100 days or, more to the point, the 1,361 days left, as of Tuesday, in Trump’s second (and let’s hope) final term.
On the 99th day of the Trump restoration, he offered up a significant clue as to how, in the face of cratering polls — the worst polls for any president at this stage of his tenure — he plans to turn things around, at least on one front.
He’s going back to basics and then some. He’s not just blaming Democrats for everything that goes wrong, but now he wants to arrest Democratic officials in so-called sanctuary cities and states if they get in the way of ICE agents’ pursuit of undocumented immigrants.
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In other words, if I were Mike Johnston, I’d be very careful about breaking any laws, up to and including jaywalking. You know Trump would love to toss Johnston behind bars, just as he had Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan arrested the other day. She now faces charges that could possibly send her to prison for as long as six years.
It’s all there for anyone to see in Trump’s “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens” executive order, which says that any local and state official who interferes with enforcement of federal immigration laws engages in “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.”
It also instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi to make a list — does this sound familiar, Joe McCarthy fans? — of all cities and states that meet Trump’s criteria as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants.
Colorado will be on the list. So will Denver. So will other Colorado cities. And that’s despite the fact there’s no legal definition of sanctuary cities or states. Gov. Jared Polis denies Colorado is a sanctuary state. Johnston says Denver has never identified itself as a sanctuary city, but that there are worse things than offering sanctuary to those in need, including unsuspecting migrants sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Denver, where they’d be dropped off in the middle of a freezing winter’s night.
This was not Trump’s first executive order on sanctuary cities. It won’t be his last. He issued his first one on the first day in office, threatening to withhold federal funding. But this one sets Trump against Dem politicians. It’s not just about funding. Federal courts have already ruled against withholding funds from sanctuary cities.
This is about Democratic officials who could, in the worst case, possibly be charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was passed in 1970 for the purpose of fighting organized crime.
Trump knows that there’s little chance a mayor or governor will be convicted of anything. That’s not the point. Harassment is the point. Forcing Democrats to defend, say, Johnston or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is the point. Which allows Trump, not that he needs permission, to say that the Democratic officials care more about, uh, foreign terrorists than about U.S. citizens.
And it’s about coercion and fear because Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is running well behind schedule — and to keep the trains running on time, he needs local law enforcement’s help.
Trump’s vow to deport millions was one of his most effective campaign issues. Some of us guessed that people would eventually be repulsed by Trump’s methods, once they actually saw them. But I never thought it would happen this quickly.
In the latest, the Trump administration had three children, all U.S. citizens, deported to Honduras with their mothers. Lawsuits have been filed, and the way to bet is that the mothers were coerced and the children denied their rights. To make it worse, one of the children has stage 4 cancer and had no access to medical attention while kept in internment.
Yes, people are repulsed, just as they are in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent, without due process, of course, to the El Salvador gulag in what administration officials originally admitted was a mistake. He has now become the face of Trump’s overreach. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll, only 26% say Abrego Garcia should be kept in El Salvador. Forty-two percent say he should be returned to his home in Maryland, apparently rejecting Trump’s attempt to link him to the MS-13 gang.
It’s enough to make you think that Trump, the showman, may be leaving at least some people to wonder if he’s been on the stage too long.
He says he wants these deportations to keep criminals off the streets, but even the latest, well-publicized case, from Colorado Springs, isn’t everything Trump might have hoped for.
This is what Trump wrote on social media of the DEA raid at the after-hours hangout:
“A big Raid last night on some of the worst people illegally in our Country — Drug Dealers, Murderers, and other Violent Criminals, of all shapes and sizes, and Judges don’t want to send them back to where they came from.”
Pam Bondi took it one stop further and called those detained “terrorists,” a term that, under Trump, has lost all meaning.
But of the several hundred, the only ones detained were the 100 or so there without legal status or those facing a warrant. The rest were allowed to leave, despite the drugs on hand. And according to the DEA, the Drug Dealers and Murderers and other Violent Criminals accounted for two such warrants.
Was the raid about criminals and drugs and violence or was it about rounding up immigrants to deport, probably to El Salvador, possibly using the Alien Enemies Act, which a Colorado judge has already blocked from being used?
You know the answer. It’s similar to what took place in Adams County in January where there was another raid of an after-hours club, with no charges being brought, but with many sent into ICE detention for being in the country without documents.
In 100 days, Trump has botched the economy, betrayed our allies, happily communed with a cool El Salvador dictator in the Oval Office, the same office where he had previously lambasted the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker: In one case, “Trump treated a moral hero as an ungrateful scoundrel. In the second, he treated a sadistic dictator as a soulmate.” And promised to send “homegrowns” to his prison complex next.
It took a hundred days, but it feels like people are finally starting to not just notice, but to loudly object.
And here’s my prediction for the next hundred days, as Trump poll numbers will likely continue to drop and the level of chaos and disorder continues to rise: Trump will become a little bit more desperate. And a lot more dangerous.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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