The Next 100 Days and The Bulldozer

Tonka!

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to tell you why I keep thinking about heavy farm equipment.

So his first 100 days in office (this time around) has brought about more negative change than anyone thought was possible — or at least faster than anyone thought would happen — so let’s look at what might happen by the end of the next 100 days (by around August 8). And given that more happened faster this past 100 days, let’s presume more and faster this next 100.

• More specifically, let’s look at what may emerge/happen during that window and what may disappear.

To level-set before we start, here’s the scenario matrix I put together before the Inauguration:

Important context and caveats in the original post.

It’s clear now that those two right-most scenarios are in a slap-fight with each other that’s about to turn into a real fistfight instead.

OK, let’s start with now and then go to the immediately next.

His approval polls are incredibly bad right now — on everything. Normally he cares about polls because they’re connected to his electability and his popularity and his projected image of strength but I think he has competing priorities right now like revenge, etc. that make him care about polls less. All those polls came out over the past week or so.

• When a president’s popularity dips it’s usually because of one thing, and if it’s just one thing his popularity can bounce back quickly as soon as he can change the narrative. When a president’s popularity dips for a whole range of reasons at the same time his popularity usually doesn’t bounce back quickly because he can’t change all of those narratives. In that case his popularity goes low and tends to stay low.

• The magic number I’ve had in my head for years is that his rock-solid base — his absolute floor for his support — is 44% of the country. He’s polling a few points below that now — only a handful of points. That isn’t much but it means that at long last he’s losing some of his base. And in the next 100 days things should start getting really bad for his supporters and for him and for all of us.

Yes, a recession is very probably coming — soon — if we’re not already in one now. (Recessions are always recognized about a quarter in hindsight and Q1 had no tariffs; only the promise of them. When the Q2 numbers come in, we won’t be able to deny the economic truth any more.)

• The starter-effects of tariffs — even if he makes magic deals with every country in the world and this economic and supply chain disruption is only remembered as a blip — will probably be evident in the next maybe four weeks. Many retailers will probably preemptively raise prices to pay for the tariffs on their next import shipments. And then they’ll keep those prices high to continually pay for each following import. And so on after that.

• Asset management firm Apollo Global Management this week gave this presentation with their estimated timeline for the sequence of damage. Slides 4 and 39 are the big ones: shipping slowdowns this spring, recession by summer, stagflation ongoing after that.

Last week, the CEOs of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot told him that if he goes through with reciprocal tariffs, particularly on China, American stores would start seeing empty shelves of some products in as little as two weeks. The Port of Los Angeles reported this week that import shipments to the Port will decrease 35% by next week. This means that those price hikes, empty shelves, and trucking and delivery industry layoffs are imminent. Subsequent slowdowns should be felt over the following 4-6 weeks at-the-speed-of-water-transit as fewer import shipments from China arrive at the Ports of Houston, Savannah, and New York. UPS plans to lay off 20,000 employees soon as Amazon orders decline.

• This means there won’t might be some impact sometime soon; it means it’s already started to happen and just hasn’t hit your neighborhood yet.

• Want to be a futurist? Look at what has already started to happen but hasn’t fully arrived where you are yet. Do that and you will start saying things it’s too early to believe.

There won’t be much predictability for a while and thus planning for particular shortages won’t be easy to do for a while, either. One apparent order of shortages was expressed as bananas then bridal gowns then Back to School products and clothes.

• The idea is that perishable items would be the first to disappear — or just yo-yo a lot. So our fresh produce in grocery stores, restaurants, fast food, etc. might be hit first — and Chipotle and fast-casual restaurant prices may become even more absurd. Within this 100 days.

• After that it would become apparent in the prices of seasonal items like clothing and items connected to holidays. Almost all fireworks are made in China. Many school supplies and clothes are made in China or elsewhere. So Back to School shopping may become more of a rolling thing — sorta buy-it-when-it’s-available-throughout-the-school-year rather than one big haul in August. And a BIG heads-up here: American retailers place their Christmas orders in April. Most Christmas decorations and toys are made in China. So some American retailers, particularly midsized ones and small businesses, are terrified right now because one bad Christmas could bankrupt them.

Medicaid — or lots of it — may disappear. The GOP in the House is trying to craft his “one big beautiful bill” of cuts to government and services to pay for the tax break he wants to give to the wealthy. They’re trying to get it done by Memorial Day but realistically I suspect it will be finished in June.

• There is no math in the sections of the budget the cuts are supposed to come from that don’t massively cut Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

• About 40% of Washington, DC residents and large, large swaths of the populations of rural red states rely on Medicaid.

• Nearly $1 out of every $5 spent on health care in this country comes from Medicaid. Medicaid also pays for 41% of births and fees for more than half of the Americans in nursing homes. Medicaid also keeps some rural hospitals afloat — and some of those hospitals are the largest employer in their counties.

• You know all those Trump supporters a few months ago who were happy about him going after Obamacare but not understanding that their health insurance was through the Affordable Care Act? They’ll probably get punched in the nose again by Medicaid cuts if they get passed.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with the debt limit but we should find out any day now exactly when the United States will default on its debt — which may be within this 100 days. And if we default on our debt we will wake up in a whole new world order. Permanently.

• Whenever I hear some guy on the Right say that if cuts aren’t made to whatever random part of the government budget or the country will go broke I think (1) from there? Are you serious? Why not cut from the military or simply raise taxes on people and companies who can afford it? Cutting from there — or placing tariffs this way — is so short-sighted a solution that it will fatally disrupt everything. It’s like saying If we don’t shoot the United States in the head, it’s gonna die. This is why panicked markets now spike a bit every few days after he sounds like he even might back down off of everything: it’s because he’s momentarily tipped the muzzle away from our economic cranium.

Oh, and we may see military troops in American streets by the end of this 100 days or later in the year. He just declared most of the US-Mexico border in three states to be part of Fort Huachuca in Arizona. This empowers military troops to arrest people who cross or are near the border as if they are trespassing on a military base.

OK, everybody, heads up: (1) It’s really against the law for the US military to be used against its own citizens. It’s a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and it messes with the Military Purpose Doctrine. (2) It requires an actual act of Congress to convert that much federal land into a military installation, and (3) What the actual national, legal, and patriotic fuck? Not because of militarizing the border — that’s problematic enough — but because what if he decides to declare some “sanctuary city” a military district. He’d then be able to order the military into American streets to do police work, especially if he invokes the Insurrection Act against undocumented people. Or to crack down on protesters like he did in Lafayette Square in 2020.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic on this — and yes, hyperbole is the greatest threat to our freedom — think about it this way: He went so far so fast on everything this past 100 days do you think he’ll go slow on this in the next 100? Especially if he needs to change the narrative about his bad poll numbers and rally his supporters with something he thinks they’ll like? (Spoiler alert: while his supporters want a crackdown on immigration I don’t think they’ll like news footage of American troops conducting arrests of immigrants and — mistakenly or not — of citizens in wherever like Columbus, Ohio.)

He may also take another crack at reclassifying the jobs of tens of thousands of mid-level federal employees from apolitical service positions into Administration-support positions so he can fire them at will if they fail to obey him or implement his orders.

If you don’t work for the federal government, here’s a couple of things to know. (These are overstatements that are mostly true most of the time rather than exactly true all of the time.)

• First, if an Administration seeks to take an action that’s inadvisable or will clearly do harm or make a mistake, the federal bureaucracy is obligated to inform him of the potential ramifications ahead of time.

• Second, if the president orders an action that’s clearly illegal, the federal bureaucracy doesn’t implement it until a law is passed that makes it legal or the courts or a judge say No, that actually is legal after all. And selfishly, federal workers do not want to go to jail for breaking the law even when they are ordered to.

Trump interprets both of those as disloyalty and resistance from federal employees rather than proper duties and adherence to the law. This is why he may try again soon to reclassify those positions as “Schedule F” positions.

• Remember: the opposite of corrupt patronage systems is apolitical bureaucracy rooted in the rule of law rather than the will of a king. (Ask the Founding Fathers, especially John Adams.) It was a big deal at the founding of our Republic and we’ve been slowly trying to implement it fully ever since. Trump wants to reverse all of that.

And of course we may get a couple of Constitutional crises between the Executive and Judicial Branches or between the Executive and Legislative along the way.

So what could we get by the end of Trump’s second 100 days in office? Anger, frustration, recession, product shortages, health care provider crises, and some troops in American streets. And again, sure, I’m probably being hyperbolic but if on Inauguration Day I’d said we’d be here today, you would have said I was crazy. So let’s take the maximalist position this time, you know, just for fun.

So here's why all this makes me think about heavy farm equipment.

It’s not about the presence of anger but the lack of faith in legitimate avenues of recourse.

When the Left and the middle get mad they don’t shoot people or insurrect or riot in the Capitol. Why not? Because they still believe in elections and the courts and the law and persuasion and protests and the power of snark. MAGA doesn’t. Or barely still does. Because their faith in elections and in nonviolent change has been deliberately eroded over time — by him and by that whole media ecosystem and sphere. That’s why we get the occasional MAGA-issue-related mass shooting and Capitol Riot: because that’s the only recourse they think they have left.

So what happens when the ramifications of Trump’s actions really start to hit the red states by maybe as soon as the end of this next 100 days and Republicans give up on yelling at their Members of Congress at town halls? I keep thinking that some farmer, thinking he has no other option and that the midterms are too far away and won’t work, is going to run his bulldozer through the White House fence. And that would kick off a whole new kind of Bad.

But even if we don’t get a bulldozer and even if he only does half of the things I’ve mentioned here or even half of the economic impacts don’t arrive, some things still will. And that means that by the end of his next 100 days, the “resistance” — whatever that is — will no longer be made up just of Trump opponents; it will grow.

It will gain people he betrayed.