Trump at 120: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Amidst the preening, posing, trolling, and bombast, it's a mixed bag.

Donald Trump is now four months into his second term. It’s been quite a ride. Trump has surprised even jaded political cynics like me when it comes to doing what he said that he would do if elected. Whether or not that’s a bad or good thing happens to depend, I reckon, on one’s perspective. But I’ll give him this: he’s doing what many people wanted when they voted for him. Kudos, at least, for that.

Most of you know that I am no fan of Donald Trump. I think that Trump is a cheat, a liar, a boor, a bully, and a megalomaniac—and those are his redeeming qualities. I doubt very seriously that Trump is anywhere near being a decent human being. I think that he’d sell out his own grandmother if it were even just a little bit helpful in getting himself out of a scrape. I just don’t like the guy, and I probably never will.

But so what? That’s just too bad for me. I don’t have to love the guy to acknowledge that he’s the president and to evaluate his deeds in that role one at a time.

Unlike MAGA, I doubt that figuring out Trump is five-dimensional chess. I think that, with Trump, what you see is what you get. For all of my misgivings, I can grudgingly respect the fact that Trump wears his conceit on his sleeve in completely plain sight. There’s actually a wacky form of honesty in his dishonesty. The fact of the matter is that Trump, with all of his mendacity, trolling, braggadocio, and steamrolling, just might be the stress test our political system needs right now after decades of intellectual decline, internecine warfare, and the decades-in-the-making singular accomplishment of kicking cans down the road. If you look up “push comes to shove” in the dictionary, it’s Trump in the picture waving at you.

Trump has, as far as I can tell, two things currently going for him: The first is that he’s still a better president than either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris was or would have been. The second is that Trump Derangement Syndrome is about as much fun as you can have if you happen to be one of the rapidly declining number of people left who get their news from the legacy media. He gets grace from me, at least, on that alone.

It is nearly impossible to overestimate the levels of distrust and antipathy that developed among a majority of Americans toward the Biden-Harris administration (and their enablers in the media) over four years of rampant gaslighting. Even the very rationale for a Joe Biden presidency in the first place was a bait and switch. As time went on, it was obvious that from COVID to Title IX to public safety to the southern border to the economy and even Biden’s own obvious mental decline, almost everything that came out of the White House was self-serving spin and nonsense. The principal reason I (and I daresay others) find it difficult to get too wound up about Trump is simply because of what preceded him.

Sad as it is, it’s a pretty low bar in presidential politics. I’m reminded of the immortal words between Col. Potter and Maj. Frank Burns concerning a garbage detail on a long-ago episode of M.A.S.H.

Burns: I won’t let you down, sir.

Potter: There’s no way you can.

So, you think that various members of the Trump administration are spectacularly unqualified for their posts? I’m less than thrilled with some of them myself. But what about the cross-dressing thief of women’s luggage who was tasked with supervising our nation’s nuclear waste management in the previous administration? What about the previous U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, a science-denying trans person who suppressed scientific research concerning the health and safety of children because it ran afoul of the preferred woke narrative?

Trump’s questionable legal gambits have you worried about the rule of law? What about Alvin Bragg, Letitia “Jailhouse Rock” James, and Fani Willis? Though two wrongs do not make a right, in an exchange of dueling aphorisms, what goes around comes around.

You think that Trump has little concern for civil liberties that he finds inconvenient? Me too. But how, exactly, is Trump any worse than the previous administration, which actively and alarmingly leaned on the media and social media to suppress disfavored speech that they could not due to the First Amendment? The fact that their behavior was in blatant disregard for the Constitution slowed them down not one bit.

Trump’s affronts against science got your privies in a vice? Two words: COVID pandemic. Right now science is polling only slightly better than Congress and the media when it comes to public trust. Let that sink in. And make sure to thank Anthony Fauci the next time you see him.

Finally, Trump's laying siege to ivory towers by way of trebuchets hurling napalm at piles of federal dollars and untaxed endowments over defiance of federal laws got you defending the extortion racket known as higher ed? Please. Now you’re just being plumb silly.

Concerning TDS and its attendant insanity. Just this morning I discovered, courtesy of New York Magazine via The New York Times, that former aides to Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman are worried that his post-stroke mental acuity may be declining, as evidenced by his insufficiently anti-Trump behavior. Calls from the left for his resignation are growing.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight. The guy who saved a Pennsylvania Senate seat for the Democrats, the guy who actually understands the Senate’s role in "advice and consent," the guy who recognized the ramifications of "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” in the dynamics of the last election, and the guy who supports a popular law that allows the detention of illegal immigrants for theft, assault, or other serious crimes has lost his mind because he is willing to work with the current president on some things, but the people who believe that men can become women, that never met a member of MS-13 that they couldn’t imagine as the lovable dad in a modern version of Ozzie and Harriet, and think that “resistance” to what more than half of the country voted for is the most obvious path out of the political wasteland they occupy are the harbingers of reason and sanity?

That’s the current left in a nutshell.

Another reason that I have a difficult time getting overly wound up about the daily barrage of Trump’s alleged and real transgressions is that I’m hearing about them from a media that I don’t trust. Right now, the legacy media is engulfed in that final swirl around the inside of the ceramic bowl just before the entire mess disappears down the pipe. Their desperation is palpable.

Over the past few months, there has been much navel-gazing over how the media managed to overlook the most significant story of the 21st century—the completely evident mental decline of the world's most influential elected leader. Somehow, media outlets with the resources of The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, et al. all managed to get this story wrong while most everyone else in America was aware that the fix was in. This wasn’t a case of not knowing; it was a case of not wanting to know. However, that hasn't deterred anyone in the media from assigning blame in order to avoid responsibility.

My favorite excuses are the ones where the media simultaneously blame Republicans for making the whole thing up and Democrats for withholding the truth. Yeah, Chuck Todd, I’m looking at you.

“This is an attempt by some to virtue-signal, and it’s this horrible sort of pitting different news organizations against each other when ultimately the people at fault are Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, every elected member of Congress.”

Really? REALLY? Since when is the lazy, unprofessional act of presenting spin as actual news not the fault of the media who put it out there? Back when actual journalism was a thing, you’d have lost your job even at the Lower Podunk Gazette for presenting the City Council’s press release as the last and only word on a proposed levy.

So here’s where I’m at with Trump after his first 120 days. The good: border security, putting a dagger in the heart of woke, carrying a big stick, and some long-overdue accountability for miscreants in the previous administration. You hear me talkin', hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on your ass. The Bad: picking unnecessary and self-defeating fights with the judiciary, embracing lawlessness to fight lawlessness, trolling, Truth Social rants, and most of Trump’s cabinet. The Ugly: Tariffs and the economy.

I will say this with regard to tariffs. It has been widely reported that China is suddenly willing to come to the table to discuss fentanyl and intellectual property in exchange for tariff relief. If this is true, it’s huge.

I believe that two of the biggest problems facing America are the influx of drugs, particularly fentanyl, into our communities and widespread untreated mental health issues, which are not unrelated to each other. While I believe there are more effective approaches to dealing with China (or anyone else) than imposing tariffs, I am willing to forgive Trump's tariffs if he successfully convinces the Chinese to halt the supply of precursor chemicals to the Mexican cartels, thereby preventing the spread of fentanyl into our communities. I’ll gladly take that hit to my 401k. It’s better than going to jail for wringing the neck of anyone I catch selling drugs, especially to kids.

I hate drugs. I really do. Drugs adversely affect about half of the people in the foothills of Appalachia, where I come from, in one way or another. Even out here in the wide open spaces of the Intermountain West, the scourge of drugs is growing. The drugs easily available on the streets everywhere these days are way more potent than the drugs that my generation grew up with. People my age had a choice because it was a fair haul from experimentation to addiction. These days, the distance between you consuming a drug and it consuming you might be just once.

If Trump fixes that, and I think that he’s half succeeded already by fixing the border, even if he stumbles into the rest, it’s a win as far as I’m concerned. A flawed and imperfect bearer of a solution is better than no bearer at all.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com