PIERS MORGAN on Donald Trump's first 100 days in office

PIERS MORGAN on Donald Trump's first 100 days in office



Crikey…. has it really only been 100 days?

It feels more like 100 years since Donald Trump became President of the United States.

But on Saturday, he will indeed celebrate his first century of days at the White House.

Love him or hate him, and for the vast majority of Americans – not to mention the wider world – there’s absolutely no middle ground on Trump, it’s been a stunning rollercoaster of a ride for the brash, swaggering New York tycoon.

On a positive note, by any dispassionate non-partisan yardstick, he’s not turned out to be the unconscionable monster many of his critics feared.

I defy anyone to look at Trump’s record as president to date and name one thing he’s done that truly qualifies as ‘monstrous.’

Sure, he’s been wildly unpredictable, contrary, hypocritical, flip-flopping and often unsettlingly economical with the truth. None of which is entirely shocking given what we saw during the election campaign.

But he’s also proven to be a bold, flexible, energetic and often surprisingly effective president.

Most significantly, Trump’s taken a gigantic slug at the Washington political system and smashed it into irrevocable pieces. The fact that someone like him, a man with zero political history, won the election at all sent most of DC’s inmates into severe anaphylactic shock. To their horror, it turns out he has absolutely no intention of calming down and playing by their normal rules now he’s sitting in the White House.

Trump’s anarchic style has thus caused complete chaos in the hallowed halls of US government but I’ve found it rather refreshing to watch someone throw all Washington’s rigidly conventional plates into the air, then wait to see how they land.

Remember, this is a system that for the past two decades has presided over endless ruinously expensive war, financial Armageddon, and huge rises in both the rich/poor divide and jobs-stealing globalisation.

All while Congress reduced itself to a bickering cesspit of intransigent point-scoring and inaction.

It needed major reform and now it’s come from the most unlikely source.

Trump’s not just been a bull in the establishment china store, he’s been a herd of rampaging bison.



This hasn’t endeared him to many in America’s mainstream media, intelligence agencies and judiciary. Nor to the permanently outraged luvvies of Hollywood.

But it has electrified large swathes of Americans sick and tired of seeing the elite prosper as they have suffered. And latest polls show they are loving his presidential performance just as much as his enemies are hating it.

To his supporters, Trump is doing exactly what he said he’d do.

To his critics, he’s been a walking, talking wrecking ball of hideously amateur and offensive proportions.

The truth, as always with Trump, lies somewhere in between.

On the foreign stage, ‘America First’ Trump has been a revelation – probably even to himself. He’s charmed the leaders of China and Japan, reinforced his commitment to major US ‘special’ relationships with countries like Britain and Germany, and given NATO the shake-up it deserved.

Then Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to murder young children, and Trump suddenly faced the same red line on which Obama shamefully failed to act four years ago.

Trump the citizen didn’t think America should get into more messy military conflict with warring Middle East nations, and preferred a good relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Trump the president watched the horrifying images of young children being deliberately annihilated by Sarin gas and took immediate, decisive action – unleashing 59 Tomahawk missiles at Assad’s forces.

It was an entirely correct and proportionate response from the world’s No1 superpower to a grotesque breach of international warfare rules.

It also told a doubtless startled Putin that his so-called poodle has viciously independent fangs and is not afraid to use them when provoked.

Further, by ordering those airstrikes, Trump instantly dampened the feverish and totally unsubstantiated claims that he plotted with Putin to fix the US election.

And no, I don’t buy into the ridiculous conspiracy theory that this was precisely why he did it.

Days later, a US plane dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in history on a bunch of ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan, killing 36 of them.