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Are you tired of winning yet?

It is pretty silly to grade a president on his first 100 days in office. An administration can change course over four years and the end of any term usually doesn’t look like the beginning. But I think it’s still instructive to take a look at how the beginning has gone. As a candidate, Donald Trump sold himself as a president who would WIN and make the big deals to help America WIN. He seemed to be promising an immediate turnaround for the country so I think it’s fair to judge him on how he’s done so far.

So far, in my opinion, it’s not working out. President Trump had to sell himself as a dealmaker and winner because that is all he has: he has no political experience of any type, no policy knowledge whatsoever, and no idea how government works. It’s really striking that even with Republican control over the executive and legislative branches, so few of these deals have happened. So far, he’s governing like a senior citizen with a big mouth who gets all his information from cable news.

Trump needed some quick wins after the divisive election and he hasn’t gotten them. Take the failure of Obamacare repeal in the form of the AHCA (based on the bill’s reception, I assume the “H” stands for “Hindenburg”). It was a spectacular failure on every level. The bill would have kicked 24 million people off insurance, didn’t require insurance companies to cover basic services like maternity and mental health, was deeply unpopular, and was all to service a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. It wasn’t the Democrats who sank the bill; it was the Republicans themselves. Instead of waiting and putting together a bill that could pass, Trump and Paul Ryan rushed it. This was probably because the president of the United States was unaware of how intricate the issue is, asking “Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?” (EVERYONE.) It was clear that even though they had seven years to come up with something to replace the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans did no work during that time, like kids who screwed around for months and only started their school project the night before, and their parents yelled, “When did you know this was due?!” Then the final product looks like ass. This was politics at its most craven, with Republicans proving all that yelling at Obamacare was about the yelling and not about finding an alternative. This was poorly planned and incompetently executed.

Which brings us to the poorly-planned bombings of Syria and Afghanistan. I have no idea what we should do in Syria as I’m just some guy who writes when he’s bored. But nobody in America wants a ground war in the Middle East again since we don’t want to open a Pandora’s Box that we can’t close. The strike just didn’t seem to do anything. A lot of Trump’s voters wanted him to stay out of the Middle East and I couldn’t blame them for being annoyed now. Ironically, Trump was so concerned about the fate of “beautiful children” who got gassed but won’t let any of those kids in the country as refugees.

Which brings us to the Muslim ban. Two courts have now struck this down and the only thing it did was to mobilize the opposition. It’s hilarious that the judges used Trump’s and his allies’ own blathering about banning Muslims to prove that yes, the ban targeted Muslims. He has only himself to blame. The executive order was another shoddy piece of workmanship that was rushed into production and somebody said, “read like it was drafted by Lionel Hutz.” Another court has granted an injunction against the executive order that would defund sanctuary cities. It would have given the executive branch the power to withhold funding from states, which would violate the separation of powers in the Constitution. This was another order written by the incompetent.  

Which brings us to the president’s work ethic. He’s taken like 19 golfing trips in three months, more than Obama did in eight years, while he hasn’t even nominated appointees for something like 500 federal offices. He discussed bombing Syria over a “beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the Chinese president and discussed possibly classified materials with the prime minister of Japan a few months ago. After the inauguration, Trump doubled the fees for Mar-a-Lago to some insane amount. The implication is clear: He’s making money on millionaires who want to pay to see the president discussing something important with a world leader over a burnt steak slathered in ketchup. Talk about crooked. This is not even to mention Ivanka Trump, whose claim to fame is selling jewelry on QVC, getting a trademarks from China after the family met with the country’s president.

Which brings us to the nepotistic appointment of his son-in-law to handle the following issues: Promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, solving the opioid crisis, meeting with the generals in Iraq and reforming veterans’ care. Jared Kushner earned this responsibility by being a newspaper publisher so I’m sure with my years in publishing, I’m at least qualified to be an emissary to North Korea.

Which brings us to North Korea. Why the hell are we getting into needless tension with this country? Trump is just saying stupid things about a nuclear-powered country that wants war, ruled by an autocrat who has no regard for the well-being of his citizens. Then after a 10-minute conversation with the (admirably patient) Xi Jinping, the president of the United States concludes that North Korea is “not so easy.” A non-comatose adult who claims to have just realized that North Korea is tricky to deal with is not someone I want in charge in this potentially scary situation.

Which brings us to President Trump’s relationships with fellow heads of state. He acted like a total jackass with Angela Merkel, refusing to shake her hand. He hung up on the prime minister of Australia. He invited the president of China and his wife not to the White House but to glorified country club Mar-a-Lago (they had to stay somewhere else because there weren’t enough rooms available). He even accused the British of spying on him, needlessly pissing off our closest ally.

Which brings us to the wiretapp allegations. When President Trump said that during the campaign Obama tappped Trump Tower, he offered no evidence and pretty much got laughed out of town (along with Devin Nunes and his Keystone Kops investigation of the supposed leaks). It was a textbook example of getting bad press and making up a wiretapp story to say, “Look over there!” and distract everybody. It didn’t work, and it speaks very badly to the president’s worldview. Anytime he has to face information he doesn’t like, he—like a coddled snowflake who needs a safe space against criticism—calls it fake, offering no evidence other than “it’s fake because I said so.” The jobs report during the Obama administration was fake news because it didn’t flatter Trump but when the first jobs report under his administration showed similar information, then the report all of a sudden became true. This dismissiveness toward facts that we don’t like is something either the dimwitted or addled do.

Let’s see: Is there anything else? Oh, right—the Trump administration is under FBI investigation for possible collusion with Russia to influence the outcome of the election.

We’ll have to see during public testimony how much there is to the Russia story. But the fact that it was only 60 days before the Trump administration was under this very serious investigation, and that so many people are implicated in very shady dealings with a foreign power, at least knocks half a letter grade off the president’s score. This has the potential to be a serious undermining of democracy, and the term is just getting started. For the sake of our country, I hope there’s nothing there but I’m getting a sickening feeling about it.

I really didn’t want to go into this in such a negative manner. There are a few positive developments in these 100 days, like Trump backing down from shutting down the government over the magic wall at the Rio Grande, firing Michael Flynn, sidelining Steve Bannon, and realizing the value of NATO. But these seem like pretty low bars to clear. He got Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court (a victory for him but it remains to be seen if it will be a victory for some of the public down the line), but it still took Congress overturning the filibuster to do it. Maybe my views are so negative because this administration has simply gotten off to a negative start. I’m not seeing a whole lot of helping the middle class through more jobs like Trump promised and some of his actions, like removing the rule that investors have to have clients’ best interests in mind, are contrary to helping the little guy. It just seems like a whole lot of self-inflicted drama, flip-flopping on campaign positions, a million little breaches of protocol, and undignified Tweets.

What surprises me is that President Trump is not the scary autocrat like a lot of people feared. The real problem here is that this guy just doesn't know what he’s doing.