100 Days: President Trump hit his 100^th day in office today, an artificial productivity benchmark by which new presidents are judged. He has judged himself to be the best. “I don’t think there has ever been a president in this period of time who has done what we have done.”

Franklin Roosevelt set the mark in his first 100 days, rolling out the New Deal and signing 76 bills into law. In fairness, it was a time of national emergency, but Trump has yet to sign a significant new law.

Although he has dismissed the importance of the first 100 days, Trump ran with a “100-Day Action plan” in which he promised to issue a long list of executive orders and “introduce” major legislative measures, including repealing and replacing Obamacare and simplifying taxes for the middle class. He has signed many of those orders, but he has been thwarted twice on healthcare and his tax proposal benefits the rich much more than the middle class. His immigration orders have been blocked in court.

He did fill an empty Supreme Court seat that should have been filled by President Obama, influencing decisions for as many as the next 30 years. His executive orders may influence public policy on pollution, financial, and consumer regulation for just as long. But at 100 days, Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point since Dwight Eisenhower.

Trump’s primary accomplishment so far is declaring his intention to dismantle government as we know it and install the people to do the job. He appointed an energy secretary who once wanted to abolish the entire department and an education secretary who knows little about education and never sent her children to public school. His secretary of environmental protection has spent years litigating against the agency he now runs. Trump wants to cut virtually all money spent to study and fight manmade climate change. Congress hasn’t given him money to build his border wall.

In foreign affairs, he has already bombed Syria and is ramping up threats of war with North Korea.

New Yorker Editor David Remnick writes, “His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite.”

Trump has established himself as a serial liar who will say anything in the moment to argue his case. He has gone to war with the legitimate press, deriding them as “fake news,” when actual fake news reports, some of them produced in Russia, helped him get elected.

Remnick describes Trump as “an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes.”

Tomorrow is day 101.

Econ 101: The US economy grew at an anemic 0.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, the slowest quarterly rate in the last three years. The growth rate was 2.1 percent in the last quarter of 2016. Housing is doing well, but retail sales are slowing, putting a drag on the economy.

The Gun Beat: President Trump told a cheering crowd at the National Rifle Association convention in Atlanta that, “The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end.” He’s the first sitting president since 1983 to address the NRA annual meeting.

Trump got major support from the NRA, and he’s returning it.

Hermit Kingdom : North Korea flubbed another missile test yesterday. Before the test, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the UN Security Council that North Korea’s failure to curb its missile tests and nuclear program could lead to “catastrophic consequences.”

A Droite: The leader of France’s far right National Front party, whose presidential candidate is Marine le Pen, has resigned after the resurfacing of an old interview in which he questioned the Holocaust.  Jean-François Jalkh had told an interviewer in 2000 that he doubted the Nazis used the gas Zyklon B to exterminate Jews. The National Front has some of its origins in the anti-Semitism of Marine le Pen’s father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Et Tu, Barack?: Former President Barack Obama accepted $400,000 to deliver a speech to the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. He and Michelle already have a $60 million book deal.

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