Trump critics exude desperate political nihilism

So here we are, 100 days into the Trump presidency and what do we have? Normality. Trump is moving as quickly as possible to—gasp!—keep his promises. He has assembled the most impressive cabinet I can remember. He has nominated and had confirmed a brilliant and non-ideological Supreme Court Justice in Neil Gorsuch. Illegal border crossings are down by some 70 percent. He has moved decisively to cut onerous and counterproductive regulations. He has unveiled a plan to cut taxes decisively. On trade, he has demonstrated that he meant what he said about “putting America first.” Canada subsidizes its timber industry, therefore Trump has just imposed a tariff on Canadian lumber imports. This is not “protectionist.” It is fair trade. It is, in a word that Trump likes, “reciprocal”: free trade not as an abstraction but as a process that takes the behavior of all parties into account. There is no free trade without fair trade.

On the international front, he has met most of the world’s most important leaders. He has sent a decisive message to Syria (and its puppet masters, Iran and Russia) by attacking a Syrian air force base and destroying 20 percent of its air capability after Assad launched a sarin gas attack. He has also put the pudgy North Korean bad joke of a dictator on notice, surrounding him with immense American firepower while at the same time leveraging his new-found relationship the China’s President Xi to put pressure on Kim to abandon its nuclear program. If Trump succeeds in that gambit, it will be a diplomatic triumph of world-historical importance.

Meanwhile, what does David Remnick see? A few days before the actual date, he published another hysterical (I do not mean funny) screed in The New Yorker called, “A Hundred Days of Trump.” “[Trump’s] Presidency,” Remnick writes, “has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite.”