Our first hundred days of Hell

So I’m reading the op-ed section of The Carolinian, one of the great black newspapers I write for in North Carolina, when I see this interesting editorial cartoon on the op-ed page.

This couple has a big flat screen TV on with King Trump’s scowling face on it. The wife is admonishing her husband, who's standing there with an open carton of eggs in his hands, and just as he’s about to grab one, his wife says, “Don’t you think those eggs are just a bit too expensive to be throwing at anybody?”

Wow. Talk about heavy!

In another edition of Raleigh’s premier black newspaper, the editorial cartoon shows a father wagging his finger in the air while his seated son is looking up at him with his civics lesson book open. Apparently, the boy has just asked his father a pointed question, but Dad sees need to correct his child.

“No, son,….” The caption balloon shows the father saying. “It’s not the same at all.” 

“In China, the government controls social media. But here in America, the guy who owns social media controls the government. See the difference?”

Elon Musk and DOGE, are you reading this?!!!

Lord, what would we do without great political cartoons!!!

I’ve been in the news business since 1986, and I’m convinced that if a good picture is worth a thousand words, then the value of a great political cartoon is ten times as much.

Let’s see…a generous portion of merciless snark, a healthy dose of clever irony and  and a pinch of political truth, all wrapped up into a campy illustration. Those are the necessary ingredients for an excellent and relevant political cartoon. They say with one frame what several column inches of written, bloviated opinion can’t, and indeed, in most cases, much, much better.

But c'mon, let’s face it. You could stack all of the best editorial cartoons in the world on top of one another about the disaster that is the first one hundred days of the second Trump Administration, and you still can’t come anywhere near illustrating the sheer madness of it all.

The richest, freest, most technologically advanced and culturally enriched nation in the world, now tragically and pathetically reduced to social and legal rubble, all because of one criminal despot who truly believes not only that the world is his oyster, but the rest of us are nothing but his half-baked clams.

“…I run the country and the world,” the guy who disrespectfully wore a blue suit to the funeral of Pope Francis while other national leaders wore black, bellowed in one of his many recent published interviews marking his first 100 days.

Well, if even a word of that malarky is true, he’s not doing it very well, according to the latest surveys.

Most reputable polls have Trump underwater at least 45% public approval of the job he’s doing. The lowest I’ve seen is The Washington Postpoll at 39%. According to CNN, which has Trump at 41%, “Trump’s approval at 100 days [is] lower than any president in at least seven decades.” 

That’s going all the way back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And get this. The CNN story continues that “Donald Trump won back the Oval Office and took charge of the government amid the strongest poll numbers of his political career…[but] …Americans’ views of what he’s done so far have turned deeply negative...” at the 100-day mark. 

Well, gee, it sure took the rest of you folks a long time to figure out that the old orange guy was screwin’ your goose.

On economic issues, protecting the border, managing the federal government, conducting foreign policy, brushing his hair…the man who would be king is underwater and sinking faster than a brick in a cheap aquarium. Even Fox News polling has Trump licking the bottom of the barrel.

Go ahead, punish yourself enough to read his Truth Social online diatribes, and he’ll insist that all that negative polling is “fake.” 

“We are doing GREAT, better than ever before,” he insists. 

And the thing that gets me is that it’s all self-inflicted. Because Trump sees himself as the end-all and be-all, he’s doing things that are hurting not just himself politically, but everyone else, including his loyal base of MAGA supporters, and even a rich guy or two, until they call him up and scream bloody murder about how he’s messing up the stock market.

Personally, while I abhor the fact that the innocent of this nation have to suffer while the demented king and his MAGA soldiers try to reshape the country in his own image, I’m glad that many of Trump's followers are being forced to get a taste of his fascist medicine.

 So emboldened is this maniac, he's even threatening to arrest judges - including U.S. Supreme Court justices - who get on his nerves. "If the Courts don't allow what we've been allowed to do for 250 years..." the Liar King wrote, "...America can no longer be the same."

Talk about constitutional crisis. If judges are now intimidated, we might as well go back to being the Lost Colonies. The prospects are frightening!

When Time Magazine recently did an Oval Office sit-down with Trump, the publication asked him if he agreed with President John Adams that “…we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men.”

King Trump’s response to that, in part, was, “I wouldn’t agree with it 100 percent. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”

Honest men like him? If my jaws weren’t already tightly attached to my mouth, they would be on the well-worn floor with that one.

The man’s tortured relationship with the truth is indeed remarkable, to say the least. He considers none of the outlandish, illegal, indisputably immoral things he’s done to be wrong.

And he’s got class clowns like Republican Sen.Tommy Tuberville of the intellectually towering state of Alabama to cheer him on.

“A+…,” Tuberville incredibly answered Larry Kudlow on Fox Business Channel, regarding rating Trump’s first 100 days in office. 

“What else can he do, Larry?” Tuby continued. “[Democrats] left [the country] in a total mess. I was up here for four years of Joe Biden. They did not do one thing for the American people or for this country. They actually tried to destroy it, and everything went down. Now, President Trump has got foreign wars, he’s got deportations, the border, tax cuts. He’s trying to save the economy. What a total disaster the Democrats created.”

I wonder if Sen. Tuberville’s seeing-eye dog shares his opinions? No, Tuby is not legally blind that I know of, but given how damn dumb he is, especially when it comes to all matters Trump, folks might as well turn the lights out in every room he every enters from now on, because Lord knows this fool can’t see the forest for the trees.

Tuby is just too dumb to realize that the rest of the civilized world beyond Alabama absolutely can see the pure disaster that King Trump is.

The crazy executive orders just keep on coming folks, over 140 of them in fact (the most of any president in history),  as do the abuses of executive power, and blunt disobedience of the rule of law and the judiciary. The obscene cruelty and calculated exercise of destroying all that is decent as demonstrated during the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency only spells more trouble for our collective future.

Thankfully, we can always count on our righteous warriors to tell it like it is!

“After 100 days under President Trump, his term can only be defined by economic hardship, divisive, partisan politics, and letting millions suffer for bigger tax breaks for billionaires,” said Congresswoman Alma Adams (D-NC-12). “The last three months have been disastrous, and my constituents have made it clear to me that they are overwhelmingly worse off thanks to this administration. But my Republican colleagues have no issues supporting President Trump’s cruel, unconstitutional actions anyway.”

And, of course, Bishop William Barber, who jump-started his historic Moral Mondays movement this week at the U.S. Capitol to protest the cruel Trump budget cuts coming down the pike that will hurt the poor and further fatten the rich.

As he was praying for the soul of this nation in the Capitol rotunda Monday, Bishop Barber was arrested and taken to jail by Capitol police, no doubt at the direction of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump lackey.

"If a preacher knows that legislators are developing policy that will create injustice, it is our duty to “go down to the palace of the King,” Bishop Barber later wrote in an email to his many supporters.

May Almighty GOD continue to bless my brother-in-Christ, and his mighty efforts to do what is right for our nation!

America has been bum-rushed, ladies and gentlemen! It’s time to get our collective heads out of the sand and realize that by the grace of Almighty GOD, the only people who can save us from this hell in America …is us!

It’s now taken just over 100 days for us to realize that the bravest among us did not die in past wars and conflicts just so that we could one day be ruled by a mad monarch.

They died to preserve democracy, decency, our constitutional rights, and the rule of law.

Those are the vital ingredients of a truly free America. It may take more than a thousand days for us to get that back, and I hope and pray that we are a people fully capable of fighting every minute of those thousand days for what we know is right.

You and I have survived the first hundred days of hell under Donald Trump.

Have you had enough, or do you need to suffer some more?