Hamza Adam 
WASHINGTON — Tuesday was the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. The first 100 days are a highly symbolic period of any presidency, meant to establish a governing agenda and illustrate command of the political landscape. This time round, Trump has unleashed a blizzard of executive actions, swingeing cuts to the federal government and hectic media scandals.
On Capitol Hill, Raw Story asked senior Democratic senators what aspects of Trump’s 100 days they thought had not been fully covered by the media, and that might be in danger of being underappreciated by the American public.
Pointing to lasting damage done to relationships with U.S. allies, not least Canada, which Trump wants to make the 51st state, one senator reached for a distinctly blunt turn of phrase.
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“Stuff that is getting attention is that Americans are poorer and less safe because of his 100 days,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a U.S. Navy pilot and astronaut in his career before entering Congress.
“What isn’t getting attention, I would say, is just the damage in the relationships with our allies. If you watched Mark Carney’s speech last night [after winning the Canadian election, to remain as prime minister], it’s pretty obvious that we now have a long-term problem with one of our closest allies. I don’t think that gets enough attention.
“It’s hard to quantify, what does that mean over the next decade, and can the next guy in the White House [change course]. You know, it’s hard to put the s— back in the donkey.
“And somebody’s got to figure out how to do that eventually. And it’s not just Canada. It’s our European allies, folks in Asia — how much confidence do they have in who we are and what our principles are, and if we’re going to stand with them or not?”
Like Kelly, Sen. Tammy Duckworth is a combat veteran. The Illinois Democrat, who lost both legs while flying Apache helicopters in the Iraq war, worried that under Trump, “the Pentagon is being absolutely gutted, and the morale is so low, under [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth. I think all of that we need to continue [to focus on].
“But fundamentally, these first 100 days is a man who’s basically destroyed America’s standing in the global order, destroyed our economy, and even gone after the fundamentals of our society and the checks and balances in the Constitution.
“That’s gonna have a lasting impact. And I am deeply, deeply disappointed in my colleagues on the Republican side that they’re going along with this. They’re part and parcel of the disruption of the checks and balances. They are basically handing over control of the purse strings of the legislative branch to a wannabe dictator. I think my Republican colleagues have become invertebrates. They’ve lost their backbones, and they’re hiding in their shells.”
‘The direction of pay to play’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, said the “chaos and corruption of the first 100 days” had been “overwhelming nearly everything” – but focused on Trump’s economic policy, which has stoked wild market swings and further undermined the U.S. position on the world stage.
“It’s staggering in part because that kind of open corruption undermines people’s confidence in an even moderately fair game,” Warren said. “When Donald Trump started the dumbest trade war in U.S. history, and then played red light, green light with the tariffs, and suddenly he reverses himself after having driven the market down … and drives the market back up, millions of people start to wonder, ‘Did the folks who were close in get a great deal there? A deal that’s not available to middle-class families in this country?’
“Same thing with tariffs. He announces, no matter what, there will be no exceptions on the tariffs. And then he turns around and says, ‘Oh, yeah, but I got a visit from Tim Cook, and now a special deal just for Apple.’ I hear from little businesses in Massachusetts who are wiped out by the Trump tariffs, but who don’t have a million dollars to contribute to Trump’s pocket, and therefore don’t get a hearing and no special deals for them.”
Before entering the Senate, Warren played an instrumental role in setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, a response to the great recession of 2008-09 that is meant to protect ordinary Americans from exploitation by big financial companies, but which Trump is now out to destroy.
“If I had to describe the story that hasn’t been told as much,” Warren said, “it is about how Trump has pushed this country hard in the direction of pay to play, and we’ve never seen anything like the scale of that at the federal government level. And then to tie that to what it means to these little businesses that are struggling to make decisions and figure out how to stay afloat while Donald Trump is changing both what the cost of their goods are and whether they’re going to have a chance to send them to other countries.
“So … the tariffs have split this country into two economies, one for a handful of billionaires and billionaire corporations that can get access to Donald Trump or his family, and the other for everybody else just trying to make a living.”
Sen. Tina Smith, of Minnesota, staked out similar ground to Warren, stressing the impact of Trump’s economic policies on her state.
“We have an agricultural economy, we manufacture a lot of things, it’s the home of Best Buy and Target. So for Minnesota, the president’s economic tariffs are, one, raising costs for them; two, hurting their businesses; and three, just creating massive anxiety, because nobody knows exactly what’s going on.
“I think of the farmers who probably many of them voted for the president and want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but they feel like they’re just pawns in his shell game. It’s a mixed metaphor, sorry. But they feel like they’re just pawns and that nobody is really thinking about what’s going on with them and what it means for them. And it does not make them feel better to have somebody say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll pay you some money.’ Like, it’s actually kind of offensive to them, and … this is happening in a moment where it’s probably one of the worst ag economies since, like, the late ’80s. Really bad. Nobody’s making any money.”
Smith also looked back, past the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, past Joe Biden’s presidency of the previous four years, and into Trump’s first, chaotic term in power, when he first used his beloved tariffs to open an economic fight with China.
“Farmers have told me, and they will tell you, that the market share that they lost during the last Trump trade war they have not yet regained,” Smith said. “They’ve gotten some of it back, but not a lot of it. And then, meanwhile, what has China done? China has shifted its purchases to South America, and they’ve invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure that you need in order to be able to get that grain to China.
“They’re not going to just flip a switch if the president changes his mind again. And so, I mean, that’s just one example of how the economy in Minnesota has been really hurt by what the president has done.”
‘You all are under attack’
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey made headlines of his own earlier this month, with a record-breaking Senate speech, an endurance epic meant to draw attention to the costs of Trump’s draconian orders.
On Tuesday, he told Raw Story that Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy was working, forcing the press and the public to constantly switch attention, from one dramatic attack on government to another, or from one policy prompting chaos in its sector to another doing the same elsewhere.
But Booker also identified Trump’s threat to the media itself as a story the media might risk not covering enough.
“We’re in a moment where the Fourth Estate, you all are under attack,” Booker said, “not just in the direct attacks, like he did in this first term [calling reporters] fake news, calling you all enemies, trying to de-legitimate you. We’re seeing greater attacks now in removing people, from turning the White House press room into a place with obsequious people who are just there to support and not there to get to facts, and then the constant threats, leading to doxing of reporters. And so this is a dangerous story in and of itself.”
Like Duckworth, Booker also highlighted the lack of opposition to Trump among Republicans in Congress.
“When you [show people] the things he’s doing, they’re wildly unpopular people on both sides of the aisle,” Booker said. “When you start talking about a Republican Party that has so often championed ideas of freedom – what he’s doing is not popular. So they find other ways to try to obscure it, and for the press not to have the bandwidth with which to do something about that.”
Citing the Laken Riley Act, a law and order law named for a woman killed by an undocumented migrant and passed by Republicans in control of Congress with some Democratic support, Booker said the enfeeblement of the press meant the true meaning of the law had gotten lost.
“I get people who will often say things to me and believe the headlines,” he said. “It goes all the way back to Laken Riley, where people did not understand … the erosion of rights that was in that. They just think it’s the headline: ‘Oh, we’re getting dangerous people off of our streets.’ Well, we fully support that. But the analysis, the factual analysis, seems to be getting lost in the larger conversation.”
source https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/donald-trump-2671865040/