[Program Note: Part 1 of this article ran yesterday. If you haven't read it, you should at least take the time to read the introduction. Today we present the conclusion of our look at the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term as president.]

Immigration

Which brings us to Trump's strongest point, albeit one where his polling is also falling fast. On the subject of the southern border, the public does approve of what Trump has been doing. But on the larger subject of immigration, Trump is underwater in most polls, after starting out his term with those numbers in the positive ranges.

This is mostly due to the chaotic implementation of Trump's "mass deportation" policies. Having masked and unmarked police grab people off of American streets to be whisked away to some prison a thousand miles away, deported without any real due process, or even sent to a foreign hellhole of a prison is not popular, now that the American people have seen the real-life effects such Draconian (and cruel) policies have on real people.

Trump has been flirting with just ignoring the courts and claiming the sole power to determine who gets to stay in America and who should get shipped to a foreign country (and/or foreign prison) with no check on this power at all. Openly defying the courts (especially the Supreme Court) would be crossing the Rubicon for Trump, since polling shows that the public overwhelmingly would disapprove of such kinglike behavior.

And, just as I predicted a while back, it seems like the administration is fast running out of the "low-hanging fruit" of deporting known criminals, and is now moving on to the phase where they just hold massive raids to sweep people up. Early on, one workplace raid generated a lot of bad press for Trump, so they seem to have slowed this down, but more and more stories of such "cast a wide net" raids are popping up, so I have to assume it's happening with more frequency. Sooner or later they'll have to get around to workplace raids out in the fields, which will have an enormous effect on farmers (if there's nobody to pick the crops, then they sometimes wind up rotting in the fields) and on the American food economy.

Ideological purge

Trump is in the midst of an ideological purge, one that would actually seem awfully familiar to Chairman Mao. All ideas deemed unworthy are being attacked relentlessly, on multiple fronts. Anything that even hints at celebrating the achievements of anyone who is Black or Latino or L.G.B.T. or a woman is being ruthlessly scrubbed from the public eye, and that's merely the most obvious targets of this ideological purge (there are plenty of others).

Federal websites are being changed to eliminate any mention of achievements by anyone who is not a straight, White male. This includes military history sites and health information provided by scientists. It also includes the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center, and the National Zoo (for some unfathomable reason). The only parts of America's history that will remain are the parts that Trump approves of -- everything else is getting chucked down an Orwellian memory hole.

High-ranking Pentagon officers have been fired or removed from their positions, for no reason other than Trump or his hapless secretary of Defense doesn't like them. A high proportion of those cashiered are women and minorities.

Media outlets are being threatened (or sued) by Trump, for saying or reporting things he does not approve of. This could include the loss of broadcast licenses for television news organizations, although that has yet to happen (it has been threatened, however). Journalists and editors and producers have been quitting traditional news media in disgust at new policies that soft-pedal news about the Trump administration. The most egregiously unconstitutional story so far is of the acting U.S. attorney in Washington D.C. taking it upon himself to send threatening letters to medical journals, questioning their editorial policies and calling them "partisans in various scientific debates." Whether such a journal is editorially biased or not, however, is no business of the government's. That's why we have a First Amendment, after all.

This is part of a larger purge of medical research, which is affecting universities all over America. Research funding is being yanked or threatened, ongoing studies have been halted, and researchers have no idea what to expect in the future. This has been one of the most underreported stories during Trump's first 100 days -- the gutting of major medical research for no reason other than Trump (or one of his minions) doesn't like it. Or it may just be a generalized attack on higher education.

Which is the next item on the list -- colleges and universities are being threatened in many different ways, from losing all their federal funding to losing their nonprofit tax status to having their accreditation threatened. All efforts on "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (D.E.I.) are being especially targeted by this purge. As are transgender people, whether they participate in sports or not.

International students are having their visas revoked for no reason other than voicing opinions that Trump or his minions don't like. Deportation proceedings are underway for many of them, for the crime of speaking out or protesting or writing critical articles in the school paper. This is, once again, severely unconstitutional in nature (that pesky First Amendment again).

Big corporations are also in the crosshairs, for anything even remotely hinting at D.E.I. or L.G.B.T. inclusiveness. I can't personally find anything in the Constitution that allows the president to dictate the political leanings of corporations (didn't Republicans used to argue that they have free speech rights?), but that certainly hasn't stopped Trump from intimidating them.

The Department of Justice has become Trump's own vicious law firm, ready and willing to open investigations into any and all Trump enemies for all sorts of imagined crimes. This leaves them too busy to perform the usual tasks of going after actual criminals. And it certainly leaves them too busy to ever investigate anyone who is seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump -- even when they are caught sharing top secret war plans on nonsecure phones with family members and journalists. The message is clear: there will be no investigations of any of Trump's friends and allies for the next four years, period -- no matter what they get caught doing.

Big private law firms have also been targeted by the Trump administration, and forced to pay fealty to the Dear Leader in the form of millions of dollars in pro bono work for causes that Trump supports.

America hasn't experienced an ideological purge of such magnitude since at least the era of Joe McCarthy. And because so many things about it are cultural in nature (instead of purely political), the comparison with Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution is inescapable.

Incompetence abounds

When you hire clowns, expect a circus. That's the inescapable conclusion that must be drawn when considering the cabinet and other top-level advisors Donald Trump has surrounded himself with. He learned his lesson in his first term -- if you hire professional people with actual knowledge, they will wind up contradicting the Dear Leader or trying to prevent him from doing something monumentally stupid. So the only criterion for his second term was to get a crowd of sycophants who will praise Trump to the skies no matter what.

His cabinet meetings are an absolute tongue-bath. It's downright embarrassing to watch one of these, as they consist of going around the table and playing the game of "Who Can Shamelessly Praise Trump The Most?" Now we know why Trump reveres the leader of North Korea so much, I guess.

And of course, you can't mention "incompetence" without mentioning Elon Musk. Musk has been applying his Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" vibe to anything in the federal government that catches his eye. This has resulted in mass layoffs of people in various different agencies throughout the federal workforce. Musk initially claimed he'd come up with $2 trillion a year savings, then lowered the bar to $1 trillion and then again to only $150 billion. He's not even going to hit that modest goal, however, and whenever he tries to prove all the savings he's achieved multiple people point out that his math simply does not add up.

Essentially, Musk just enjoys destroying things for no reason. He's like a juvenile delinquent on a vandalism spree more than anything else. In multiple instances he's fired entire departments only to have to scramble to hire them all back when someone explains that they actually perform critical work (like maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, for instance).

The full effects of all these firings haven't been widely felt by the public yet, but they will. When you gut the Social Security Administration or the Internal Revenue Service then it becomes almost impossible for a citizen to attempt to interact with them in order to solve some problem or just get questions answered, because nobody's left to answer the phone. And Social Security and the I.R.S. are just the tip of the iceberg. From now on anyone who has a need for some government service (like mine safety or food inspectors) is going to have to face the fact that few of them remain and they're so swamped with work they're not going to have time to deal with your issue.

Team Trump made it through their first 100 days without any monumental crises blowing up in their faces (unless you count what the tariffs have done to the stock market and the G.D.P.). But that luck isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later some major crisis will arrive and we're all going to find out that all of the experts who know what to do in such a crisis have all left, and nobody has taken their place. This could come from any direction, really, so it's impossible to predict.

You can call it a horrorshow or clowns in a circus, but no matter what metaphor you use it's pretty easy to see that Donald Trump's first 100 days are merely a taste of what's to come for the next three-and-three-quarters years. The ride has been rough so far, and it's almost certainly going to get a lot rougher.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant