Sunday th April

It is now one hundred days since that fateful election day in America, when despite getting three million less votes than Hilary Clinton, America elected Donald Trump as President.  I have yet to meet a single person who either likes or is not scared of what the next four, and if the horror show continues, eight years will bring.  Trump is a larger than life caricature of all that is awful about America; their ridiculous nationalism, their belief that they are better and bigger than every other country; their poor grasp of the rest of the World…etc.  And the Donald has not failed to live up to our fears.

It has been a whirlwind of a hundred days, with executive orders raining down like confetti, and controversies leapfrogging each other.  This is a president like no other, and at the time we thought Reagan and Bush were bad.  For a supposedly educated and intelligent man he seems to be blundering his way into the job, rushing through policies and ideas and branding any opposition to Trump as somehow un-American.

But despite some opposition he has still done a lot of damage, to the environment, to women and if he has his way to the disparity between rich and poor which he will widen even further.  But what we are all more fearful of is his irrational and bad-tempered foreign policy; he seems like some mad gunner switching his sights with each broadside and seeing enemies everywhere; Assad, Iran and now North Korea.

But the most damage he has done sadly seems to be to the very idea of America itself.  Obama had restored dignity to America after the Bush disaster of Iraq.  He was respected and admired by the rest of the World, and he showed us a more rational side of America.  Trump is making America look like a circus, with him a sinister clown, stomping around the ring, tripping over occasionally but mouthing awful threats and tweeting recklessly.

So what can we expect in the next hundred days.  The pace of his actions does seem to have slowed a bit lately, but there is no real sign that he is learning how Government actually works.  We will just have to wait and see.  But it is also a warning for us in Britain of how a ‘leader’ can react when they think they have an absolute mandate from the public.  Mrs. May may well be watching and learning.