100 days down, 100 to go

You’re reading Here’s Something, the satirical newsletter critics call “A little much,” “Is this what the kids are reading?” and “Seriously, who’s reading this?”

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Congratulations. If you’re reading this, it means you made it through the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. You’ve made it through 100 days of illegal defiance of the judicial branch. 100 days of spite for the working class. 100 days of state-sanctioned kidnappings. 100 days of arresting judges. 100 days of science denial. 100 days of economic warfare. 100 days of embarrassment. 100 days of bigotry. 100 days of chaos. 100 days of fascism.

And now, only 100 more to go.

You might ask, “What do you mean 100 more to go? What do you know that we don’t?”

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I’m an empty head. A clean slate. All I know is that for 100 days, an already divided country has been torn asunder by a tyrant and his autocrat lackeys. For 100 days, due process and our constitutional rights have been maimed. For 100 days, the voice of the people has been silenced.

And as of today, we’re halfway there.

“Halfway to what, exactly?!” you might yell at me.

Well, bad news: I don’t respond to yelling, and I have no idea. Not a clue. But 100 days from now, it’ll finally end.

“I feel like you’re saying you know the apocalypse is coming,” you might say, calmly now, nodding your head. “You must have some sort of third eye. How can we prepare?”

Unfortunately, there’s no way to predict that kind of thing. Just like you, I can’t see the future. We can’t know what will happen ten years from now any more than we can know what tomorrow holds. The fog of time warps all perspectives. Nothing can be promised, nothing can be kept. The only thing that we can be sure of is that in another 100 days, we’ll be completely done with the 200 days that came before.

“Oh, OK. So this is a joke,” you might sneer. “100 days left until we hit 200 days, and then it’ll be 200 days after that until we hit 400 days, and so on. And then eventually we’ll hit 730 days and you’ll say something like ‘730 days down, 730 to go’ and you’ll actually be right, assuming he allows free and fair elections to take place, and that’ll be the end of the bit. You think humor is a means of catharsis and community building or some nonsense like that, don’t you? What are your little jokes doing to fight back against the oligarchy? Are you ever gonna join us down here in the trenches or stay up there at the open mic? Or are you waiting for him to sign an executive order targeted directly at you?”

All really great points. Speaking of executive orders, he’s signed 142 of them since the start of his second term. So just 142 to go.

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Humor as a means of catharsis? I wrote about it in my essay for LitHub a couple years back.

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What I’ve been reading

Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte

“Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.”

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Order my essay collection This Won’t Help within the next 100 days.