Donald Trump hit two milestones this past week: his first 100 days in office, and his first quarter of negative G.D.P. growth. True to form, he celebrated the first of these with a rally, while blaming the second on Joe Biden. He even tried to front-load any bad economic news in the second quarter as Biden's fault too. Oh, and for good measure, Trump expressed a desire to become the next pope. Which would probably be fine with plenty of Americans -- as long as he quits his current job in order to do so.

Of course, nobody's really buying Trump's economic blame-shifting, since it's pretty obvious that he is the sole reason why the American economy is stumbling. The trade war he started with the entire rest of the world (except Russia, of course) continues to be a big drag on the economy, and the fallout has really only just begun. Trump had to walk back part of his tariffs on automobiles (which he announced at his Michigan rally this week), but he shows no signs of backing down in his pissing match with China.

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Donald Trump's trade war is on the brink of going from bad to worse. Up until now, American consumers have seen the stock market tank (and go through wild swings) and are beginning to see higher prices for some of the things they buy. But all that's about to go into overdrive, as the shock to the global trading system works its way down all of the supply chains. The next big phase of this may wind up being empty shelves in the stores -- which is going to be a monumental psychological shock to consumers.

Americans aren't generally very good at sacrifice. We do try to pull together when necessary, but usually for an external reason: A big natural disaster. The 9/11 attacks. A war. A global pandemic. But even then there are limits to what Americans will put up with (as evidenced by the politicization of COVID-19 protection measures, to name just one example). When George W. Bush announced a global war on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, he pointedly did not call for any sacrifice from his fellow Americans -- he told them to go shopping, instead.

But this time around the catastrophe is internal. It was caused by one man. And he seems awfully blasé and dismissive about it. After all, he won't personally be feeling the effects, so why should anyone else get upset?

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[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.

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Donald Trump's first 100 days of his second term as president has been a real horrorshow. I use this term deliberately, mostly because it can be used in two opposing ways... at least, if you either speak Russian or are a fan of Anthony Burgess. It can be used in the traditional English meaning of "something that is difficult to deal with or watch because it is so bad or unpleasant." It can also be used as Nadsat future-teen slang from the novel (and film) A Clockwork Orange, where it was borrowed (Anglicized) from the Russian word khorosho -- which actually means "good." So how you personally use it will depend on how you see Trump.

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Congress is back in Washington this week, and they'll soon be starting to put some actual numbers in their aspirational budget. This is going to involve a whole lot of intraparty struggles for Republicans, as different factions draw red lines on different issues. They've set an optimistic timeline for finishing, but it remains to be seen whether Republicans will be able to agree on all of the details in time to meet that schedule.

There are a lot of moving parts to their plans, and we'll doubtlessly have a chance to examine them all as we progress, but here at the start of the process I'd like to address three of their tax proposals in a rather ideological way. Two of them actually sound like good ideas, which is rather surprising (for me), seeing as how they're coming from the Republican Party. I'm not going to get into the much larger issue of the GOP's overall tax-cutting strategy here (again, we'll have plenty of time to talk about that in the coming days), choosing instead to focus today just on three campaign promises made by Donald Trump.

All three are new ideas, and all three are ideological in nature. They're all fairly radical in terms of how Congress usually changes the tax system, because they won't merely change tax rates in some marginal way -- they'll change how people do their taxes as well. While campaigning, Trump promised to completely eliminate income taxes in three big areas: tips, Social Security payments, and overtime pay. These would be much more fundamental changes than just lowering tax rates because these three ways of making money would essentially no longer qualify as income.

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Let's start with some good news today, shall we?

Donald Trump's second-term honeymoon phase now seems to officially be over. As new polling continues to roll in (in advance of his 100-day mark next week), it seems to all be telling pretty much the same story. Trump is now in a neck-and-neck race for "fastest slide into disapproval ever" -- with himself. Only one other president in modern times has seen his job approval numbers with the public go underwater this fast, and his name was also Donald Trump (in his first term). It depends on the poll, but in some he's already worse than he was at this point in 2017. No other president was even in negative territory at this point, it bears mentioning.

When you dive into the details, it gets even worse for Trump. He's down on job approval, in poll after poll. When you average them together, he's down anywhere from six to eight points. He's even down by 11 points in a poll from Fox News -- that's how bad things have gotten. He's now even registering underwater in polling on immigration, which was seen as his strongest point during the campaign (more on this in a moment...).

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As Donald Trump's second presidency approaches the 100-day mark, we should be seeing a flood of new polling on his performance so far. Today, Fox News released its own new poll, and the news is decidedly not good for Trump. And this is coming from Fox News -- which is (obviously) tough for Trump supporters to spin as some sort of liberal news outlet.

Up until now, Trump's second term has been pretty dismal, when it comes to polling. His job approval as president has been lower than any other modern president's was at this point in their terms, with only one exception -- Trump's own numbers from his first term. Now, even that's not true anymore.

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We now live in the world of Trumponomics, which might be defined as: "It's like Groundhog Day, except every day." I should specify that this is decidedly not in the sense of the movie of the same name -- where exactly the same things happen every day -- but rather in the sense that each and every day the entire world waits to see which side of the bed Donald Trump got up on: whether he's going to say something so threatening to the economy's future that the stock markets panic, or whether he's going to walk back some previous stupid comment and the stock market will recover a little bit.

The last few days have been somewhat hopeful, since it seems that some people still do have the power to stand up and explain to Trump that he is causing great harm. Trump blinked not once but twice this week, and reports are that in both cases it was directly due to people with greater knowledge than Trump explaining the ways of the world to him in such a way that he understood -- even to the point of backing down (which Trump hates to do). The first came when Trump reversed himself on wanting to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the second came as Trump hinted at weakening his brutal tariff moves against China.

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There's a new poll out from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania which has some interesting data -- interesting both for what the data says about American public opinion as well as interesting because of the specific questions that were asked. Most public opinion surveys limit themselves to a few key indicators (presidential job approval being the biggest one), but this poll seemed designed to address some pertinent current issues in much more depth.

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The Pentagon, under the "leadership" of Pete Hegseth, seems to be in meltdown mode. That specific word was used by several different people to describe it, I should mention, lest I be accused of being hyperbolic. This news kind of surprised me, because while I fully did expect there to be Pentagon-meltdown stories before now, I expected them to come from a different direction entirely. I thought Elon Musk and his minions would have taken the chainsaw to the entire Pentagon structure and procurement process and it would have blown up in their faces (much like many of their other efforts has) and thus be a big scandal. But so far, that hasn't happened in a big way. Maybe Musk has been told "hands off the Pentagon" or something? At this point, it's hard to tell.

But getting back to the actual scandal (rather than my expectations of a scandal), Pete Hegseth seems once again to be teetering on the edge of becoming more trouble than he is worth to the White House. What's more, this seems to be the result of a power struggle not between Hegseth's own personal minions and the entrenched bureaucracy at the Pentagon (as might have been expected), but it seems to be coming entirely from within Hegseth's inner circle itself. Which is also kind of surprising.

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