David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief strategist, tried to downplay interest in the president’s first “100 days”.
He said it is just a “hallmark holiday”, meaning that the date is of little interest to those who make a point of remembering milestones such as greeting card manufacturers.
That did not prevent a reluctant Obama from having to join the media in assessing what he had achieved in his first few months in the White House.
He used early 2009 to reboot the American economy after the credit crunch and to promote social issues such as equal pay, healthcare for children and gender rights. He also ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
But “Gitmo” never shut. On returning to office this year, Donald Trump ordered its expansion to accommodate migrants arrested in the US.
Many of this president’s executive orders aim to reverse the spirit of what Obama and his Democratic successor, Joe Biden, tried to do.
Rather than a greeting card, the assessment at one hundred days has become an important report card for US presidents.
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That’s why Sky News is carrying on with the TRUMP100 podcast by its US correspondents and why I was sent in 2008/9 to cover the first hundred days of Barack Obama, America’s first black president.
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Donald Trump is keen to celebrate his first 14 and a half weeks back in office.
He is planning to hold his first MAGA rally since the election in one of the key swing states which helped him to victory.
“President Trump is excited to return to the great state of Michigan next Tuesday, where he will rally in Macomb County to celebrate the FIRST 100 DAYS!” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in capital letters on social media.
There is something magic about 100, 10 x 10, the first number in three figures. In politics, “100 days” has assumed a talismanic status, defining both good and bad fortune for those it encompasses.
The phrase was coined in French in 1815 by the Comte de Chabrol de Volvic as a polite euphemism when he welcomed the restoration of Louis VIII following Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to take back power.
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Les Cents Jours – Hundred Days – covered the period from Napoleon’s arrival in Paris after his escape from exile on the island of Elba, through the military campaign which culminated in his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June, to the King’s return to the capital on 8 July.
Since then, many books have been written entitled The Hundred Days, which has come to symbolise sometimes deluded heroism.
The novelist Patrick O’Brien used it as the title for one of his “Master and Commander” books covering the activities of his British Navy Captain Jack Aubrey during Napoleon’s final campaign.
Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward, the commander of the Falkland Islands’ Task Force in 1982, called his memoirs of that UK triumph One Hundred Days.
In American politics, the one hundred days report card began with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. The Democrat FDR hit the ground running, like Obama, to turn round economic catastrophe.
In one of the first “fireside chats” on the radio, which he innovated, he reported back on “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal”.
Ninety years later, the British cabinet minister James Purnell began Leading A Government Department – the First 100 Days, a report he co-wrote for the Institute for Government, by quoting the presidential historian Godfrey Hodgson on FDR’s start.
“These were the famous ‘hundred days’, in the course of which Roosevelt saved American capitalism and – some would say – saved American democracy as well,” he wrote.
“The period set a standard by which the wisdom and effectiveness of future presidents was to be judged.”
By the yardsticks on democracy and the economy, the 47th President of the United States faces an awkward reckoning 100 days into the job.
The S&P 500 stock index is down more than 15% under Trump, and the IMF has revised down global growth forecasts due to his tariff policy.
His critics accuse Trump of undermining America’s democratic norms.
He has exploited his position for personal profit, directed the federal justice system to persecute his opponents, pardoned the January 6th US Capitol insurrectionists, unleashed the unelected Elon Musk to slash the federal government through his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, and launched the “Trump 2028” campaign to stand for a third term as president, in defiance of the US Constitution.
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Trump resumed the presidency determined not to be held back as he was in his first term.
He started signing executive orders within hours of being sworn in. So far, he has issued 124, more than half the 220 he got through in the full four years between 2017 and 2021.
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Some of these orders may be rejected in the courts. But Trump has also been helped by a supine US Congress, where his Republican Party has control of both Houses. This is in marked contrast to the resistance from lawmakers that Obama faced from his first day.
Doug Sosnik, who was President Clinton’s White House policy director, wrote in the New York Times last week: “It is safe to say that the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency will be considered the most consequential of any in modern history.
“Since taking office, Mr Trump has consolidated extraordinary power in the executive branch, dismantled large portions of the federal government, undone the military and economic alliances that were formed following World War Two and torn up the policy consensus that has governed global trade for just as long.”
Trump’s notable failures have been in foreign policy. He did not bring peace to Ukraine on “day one”. Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza continues.
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Threats to make Canada “the 51st State” have transformed the anti-Trump Liberal Mark Carney into the favourite to win this weekend’s election. His aim to “get Greenland one way or another” has alienated Greenland, Denmark and their allies and made no progress.
Trump will doubtless outline his achievements and his further ambitions at his 100-day rally in Michigan. His envoys are desperately trying to strong-arm Ukraine into a peace “deal” before then.
Obama waited several months before commenting that “the first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference”.
Next Tuesday, Trump will still have 1,360 days left to serve legally, notwithstanding his dreams of crowning himself King of America for life.
