Saturday will mark the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency.
What a time to be alive, ladies and gentlemen.
Shortly after his election win, the then-president-elect presented his initial outline of what he hoped to accomplish within his first 100 days as president. Following a steady stream of failures (more on those later), Trump became an object of further ridicule after he continued to play to his base and lowered expectations for the period.
Senate Democrats decided to troll the president by marking up a White House press release which heaped praise on the thin-skinned leader for his accomplishments. They’ve been passing around a revised version of the press release with the subject line, “White House release on President Trump’s First 100 Days Had Some Errors In It. We Fixed Them.”
Brad Jaffy, a senior news editor for NBC nightly news, shared the revised press release to his Twitter followers.
The revised press release begins with “President Donald J. Trump has done more to break promises and enrich his allies in his first 100 days than any other President in history.” Then it goes on to cite an NBC News poll where a plurarity of Americans said that the president’s performance has been “poor” and a USA Today report which ties key figures within the Trump administration to a scheme showing they’ve raked in new lobbying fees.
Among other things, the revised version provides context to many of Trump’s executive orders, which the original version hyped. In his 100-day plan, Trump spoke about preserving and improving American infrastructure. Yet the last 100 days have shown that he’s worked to strip consumer protections and reducing women’s’ health care options.
The last 100 days have seen the president face criticism at every turn. Federal judges struck down his travel ban, which targeted citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations. Judges have recently taken the administration to task for its pledge to strip sanctuary cities of federal funding, too.
The American Health Care Act, the GOP’s answer to Obamacare, crashed and burned, though as of this writing, the Conservative House Freedom Caucus has announced it would support the measure following significant revisions. Moderates are still certain.
Earlier this week, Trump indicated that parts of the federal government would begin to be shut down as of Saturday if Congress refused to relinquish the funds he demands to build the much-maligned border wall.
Although the GOP controls both houses of Congress and some party members have indicated they would be “willing to set aside funds for the border,” others have, as The Wall Street Journal notes, expressed reluctance “to imperil a bill that would need at least eight Democratic votes to pass the Senate.”
Appearing on Meet the Press, Reince Priebus, the White House Chief of Staff, told host Chuck Todd he believes there “will be enough in the negotiation for us to either move forward with either the construction or the planning or enough to get going with the border wall” when asked if the administration is willing to risk a federal government shutdown.
Speaking to a group of conservative reporters Monday night, Trump appeared to step back on his demands, telling them that he would be willing to initiate another conversation on border wall funding in September.
