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Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Bloomberg/Getty Images

As the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term as president arrived, there was the usual MAGA celebration of his incredible accomplishments and world-historical significance, particularly at a signature rally in Michigan. But amid all the triumphalism, an oldie but goodie insistently appeared in the administration’s messaging, as The Hill reported:

In a speech that invoked much of his campaign rhetoric, Trump within minutes criticized Biden’s presidency, asking the crowd, “How the hell did that guy ever become president, can somebody explain? How the hell did that happen?”

After criticizing polling companies that show his numbers sinking and claiming they poll more Democrats than Republicans to account forhis low approval rating, Trump asked the crowd in Michigan to take a “poll.”

“What’s better, sleepy Joe or crooked Joe?” he said, asking attendees in Warren, Michigan to yell out.

Trump also granted an interview to ABC’s Terry Moran, and it, too, had a retro feel: “Throughout the interview, Trump repeatedly accused former president Joe Biden of incompetence and blamed his predecessor for myriad challenges facing his administration.”

And on Truth Social came this blame-shifting exercise on the shaky economy direct from the 47th president himself:

This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!

Now this would have made perfect sense had Trump taken office with anything like a normal transition and Day One agenda. He could have eased into another Trump era as the president-elect most swing voters seemed to have wanted: one who would restore the smoothly operating economy and immigration-enforcement procedures the Biden administration had screwed up. That might have extended the public-opinion honeymoon every new president enjoys, giving his appointees and the new Republican trifecta in Congress plenty of runway to carefully plan their first exercises of power, and ensuring that any turbulence could be attributed to the lingering effects of the previous regime’s mis-government. It was really a no-brainer.

But as we now know, that’s not how Trump 2.0 began. The normally placid-if-busy transition period was full of trumpet blasts from Mar-a-Lago indicating incessantly that there was a new sheriff in town, with most Cabinet-level appointees being chosen precisely for their hostility to the status quo mission of the agencies they would run. The wildly disruptive DOGE initiative, almost scientifically engineered to signal that the Biden administration was long gone, began blowing things up the moment Trump took office, taking speed and radicalism as its governing motifs. And the 47th president himself, of course, insisted on an absolute blizzard of executive actions the minute he was inaugurated, most proclaiming a new era in which past inhibitions on presidential power would be instantly and contemptuously put aside. Throughout the Trump administration, official utterances took on a strange new tone of ideological fervor and Orwellian inversions of every conventional wisdom; one of my colleagues observed that “every memorandum or press release sounds like it was composed by Stephen Miller.” Norm-breaking became the norm everywhere you looked.

Rarely if ever, and certainly not since FDR, has a new administration taken office more determined to own the country, its policies, and its overall direction. That was clearly a deliberate choice. It’s fair to speculate as to why that choice was made. Perhaps they wanted the multiplier effect of shock and awe to demoralize federal employees and the new team’s perceived enemies. Plausibly they wanted to get as much done as possible before judicial orders and midterm elections undermined their power. There was also something almost pornographic in Team Trump’s desire to thrill the MAGA base by nihilistically breaking as many things, and hurting as many people, as possible, all at warp speed.

But any way you look at it, the decision to make the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 an extension of his megalomanic personality isn’t compatible with blaming the previous long-gone administration of Joe Biden for anything happening right now. It will become even more ludicrous as mishaps clearly attributable to Trump’s radical change of direction occur down the road. That’s particularly true in economic policy where the “soft landing” of inflation-free growth was within reach and perhaps in hand when the 47th president took office — a placid and benevolent condition of things that Trump blew up as quickly and violently as he could with a trade war nobody but him seemed to want.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp observes, Trump’s reckless start will likely erode his ability to remake American democracy into an instrument for his authoritarian goals: “‘We should thank [our] lucky stars that Trump chose to do this in the most stupid way possible,’ says Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who studies democratic backsliding.”

But for better or worse, this is Trump’s government now, and it’s too late to go back and pretend we’re still living in the shadow of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Trump’s Megalomania Undermines Biden Blame Game

Trump’s Megalomania Undermines Biden Blame Game