THE HUNDRED DAYS: It actually isn't a comedy show!

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2025

Compagno, wrong and right: The hundred days have come and gone, with a few more days thrown in.

Conceivably, several indications have surfaced concerning the president's inclinations. This first report comes from the New York Times:

Trump Says He Is Renaming Veterans Day as ‘Victory Day for World War I’

President Trump said Thursday that he would rename Veterans Day, on Nov. 11, as “Victory Day for World War I” and May 8, widely known as V-E Day, as “Victory Day for World War II,” so that the United States could celebrate its achievements in those conflicts.

“We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night post on Truth Social. “We are going to start celebrating our victories again!

 And so on from there. This second report is by the previously banished people at the Associated Press:

Army plans for a potential parade on Trump’s birthday call for 6,600 soldiers, AP learns

Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on President Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and possibly a couple thousand civilians, The Associated Press has learned. 

The planning documents, obtained by the AP, are dated April 29 and 30 and have not been publicly released. They represent the Army’s most recent blueprint for its long-planned 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall and the newly added element—a large military parade that Trump has long wanted but is still being discussed.

The Army anniversary just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14.

To see the president's Truth Social post, you can just click this. 

An overview of those reports might go something like this:

The president is back to renaming things, celebrating our national greatness while expressing a bit of resentment at our (former?) allies and friends. 

Also, the desire for that parade may be back! It would happen to land on the president's birthday, much as it would have done back in 2017.

To us, those don't seem like encouraging signs. Tens of millions of fellow citizens will disagree with our reactions.

That said, where does the president stand at the end of the hundred days? We return to this overview from the Washington Post, back at the start of the week:

Trump approval sinks as Americans criticize his major policies, poll finds

[...] 

Trump’s overall approval rating is lower than it was only two months ago. The poll shows that 39 percent of adult Americans approve of the way Trump is handling his job, compared with 55 percent who disapprove, including 44 percent who disapprove strongly. In February, those numbers were 45 percent positive and 53 percent negative.

Among registered voters, the deterioration has been even larger. In February, 48 percent of registered voters gave him positive marks, compared with 51 percent negative. Today those numbers are 42 percent positive and 55 percent negative, a swing from net negative three percentage points to net negative 13 points.

Trump’s approval rating is lower than for any past president at the 100-day mark in their first or second terms. At a similar point in their first terms as president, 42 percent approved of Trump and 52 percent approved of President Joe Biden... 

Those were the results from the survey conducted by the Washington Post / ABC News / Ipsos. Overall, recent surveys seemed to place the president job approval rating at roughly 40 percent.

Given our personal druthers, that approval rating is still way too high. Tens of millions of neighbors and friends will take an opposite view.

As a general matter, is the president's current approval rating "lower than for any past president?" 

Presumably, yes, it is—and it could easily go lower in the next few months. That said, we exist at a time when approvals are low across the board—and as long as forty percent of American voters approve of the president's performance, Republicans senators will swallow hard and follow his lead, whatever they may think in private.

In our view, those dropping numbers are encouraging, but they remain stubbornly high. For us, those stubborn numbers call a certain question—a question which goes like this: 

What might we Blue Americans have done to help keep his numbers that high?

The bell has been tolling for President Trump. Has it also been tolling for us? We expect to explore that question next week. We'll take our cue from this new interview conducted by Mediaite.

Alex Griffing conducted the interview. He spoke with Charlie Sykes, a very familiar NeverTrumper from MSNBC's Deadline: White House.

The interview proceeds at some length. With apologies for the length of the excerpt, we were struck by two different aspects of this pregnant exchange:

Is ‘Never Trump’ Dead? Charlie Sykes On The One Thing That Could Actually Restrain Trump

[,,,]

GRIFFING: ...Fox News, some of their top-rated hosts are Jesse Waters, Greg Gutfeld, who do bring kind of more entertainment vibe to what they’re doing. I mean, Gutfeld’s show is political satire, it’s comedy in a way. You think CNN, MSNBC, your point about centering more personal stories, you know, if you listen to Fox News last six months, you hear Lake and Riley, you hear the names of individuals over and over and over. Is this kind of something you think CNN and MSNBC should shift toward, kind of emulate Fox in a way?

SYKES: Well, I never want to use the term they should emulate Fox. What I do think is that they need to, again, not get caught in the information loop. You have to ask yourself, okay, are we actually telling people something that they need to know or have we decided that we’re going to sort of become a warm bath where people can sort of soak in ideological confirmation of all their biases.

And I understand how hard that is. All of this is difficult, I think, because it’s so easily misunderstood. It is possible to understand what the other side is saying without necessarily validating it or going to both-sidesism. I mean, to understand, to take seriously issues that might affect swing voters that they actually care about. And I’ll be specific.

I mean the reality is there are a lot of swing voters that actually were concerned about inflation. So simply denying that inflation was a problem was a mistake. There are swing voters that were concerned about crime and simply telling them that crime is a myth is basically says we don’t care about what you think. The border was a real problem during the Biden years and that needs to be addressed. There was a reason why the Trump campaign spent more than a hundred million dollars on one ad, one ad involving transgender surgeries and athletes. And yet, if you listen to Democrats and folks on the left, that issue didn’t exist at all.

So simply saying these are fake issues, don’t pay any attention to them, means that you shut yourself off from things that voters are talking about. The Joe Biden age story was very frustrating for a lot of folks because you could not engage in a conversation with a voter anywhere in the country without his age coming up. And yet, if you brought this up in progressive media or on certain Never Trump sites, you got flooded with what we began to call "Blue MAGA," which was don’t talk about it, don’t bring it up. It’s not relevant.

I do think that if you’re going to confront the enemy, you need to understand your enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. And I think that this is one of those moments. You know, are we going to confront Trumpism by denying Trumpism’s appeal? And then again, I hope that my record is clear enough what I think about Donald Trump and what I think about all of his works. So I am, I am not doing this both-sidesism thing. I’m just saying that, do we, are we serious about confronting it? Or are we just talking to ourselves? 

We'll start with what Griffing said.

Griffing does a lot of good work at Mediaite. But no, Virginia, a million times no—TV shows like those of Gutfeld and Watters are not "political satire...comedy in a way." That's not what they are at all.

Those nightly, primetime programs are corporate propaganda shows working through, and hiding behind, a misleading comedy vibe. In his disastrous misstatement, Griffing joins Variety in stepping aside from the role his site should be playing in challenging the pseudo-journalistic trash which spews from those TV shows.

Mediate gives those programs almost total berth. The New York Times refuses to discuss the work of the Fox News Channel all the freaking way down.

Something we were withholding made us weak, the poet once said. He was speaking of a different era in our nation's political history. We're speaking about an act of withholding which is being engaged in across the board right now.

In our view, Griffing makes an enormous mis-assessment in the passage we've quoted. In his response, Sykes suggests some of the rather obvious ways the bell should be tolling for us.

What have those of us in Blue America done to enable this president? Working from Sykes' list of horribles, we'll examine that topic next week.

That exploration will take us back to what Tom Homan constantly says. It will take us to a ridiculous statement, on the Gutfeld! program, by the remarkably misinformed Emily Compagno.

At the start of her statement last Tuesday night, the perpetually overexcited former Oakland Raiders cheerleader said this about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Rather plainly, the Fox News Channel star didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

Fight your way through the salad:

GUTFELD (4/29/25): Emily, Emily, Emily...Have the Democrats done anything in a hundred days? I can't think of anything other than whine and sing horribly.

COMPAGNO: Yes. The hundred days to the Democrats is like a complete fiction of the rest of our hundred days. So let's take the example that you just talked about, where you talked about an administrative error that needs to sort of correct someone's process, and I assume that you are meaning due process. 

But this person [Abrego Garcia] was someone who was already deported and then came back against—again, he was a recidivist illegal enterer in the country. And what I don't understand is this sort of wiping the slate clean that the Dems do when they are blurring out the signs on the White House and levying this guy, lifting him up as the "Maryland father." I don't quite understand why—it's as if their memory has only started from like two seconds in, so the conversation is just administrative.

But the point was that this guy was a wife beating, violent, gang affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times. Like, it should have stopped then. But here is the point of the hundred days...

Fight your way through the salad! As she orated on a heavily watched "cable news" program, Compagno mistakenly said that Abrego Garcia had been deported "multiple times" and had simply kept coming back in. 

She said he was "a recidivist illegal enterer in the country." Advancing to a wider assessment, she said he was "a violent, gang affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times."

Misstating the basic facts of the case, she thereby issued the wider assessment mandated on this program Millions of voters saw her angrily say that Abrego Garcia was "gang affiliated." And no, that wasn't some sort of "political satire." 

It wasn't "comedy in a way." It was pure, undisguised corporate messaging, performed by someone who seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. 

Were her obvious misstatements corrected? Fellow citizens, please!

Darlings, this was the Gutfeld! show! Every guest who appears on this program will endorse the ultimate mandated talking-points. It doesn't matter how they get there—and no, this isn't an "entertainment" program. 

Instead, the program is an assault on the human experiment, as is the way a wide array of alleged "news orgs" have agreed that they must never report or discuss what happens on such programs.

Compagno is co-host of the Fox News Channel's mid-day show, Outnumbered. When she's introduced on the Gutfeld! program, her high excitability factor is almost always mentioned.

With that high excitability, she delivers pure corporate messaging, like everyone else on this program. She isn't joking when she does that, and this isn't a comedy program.

News orgs like Mediaite and the New York Times have agreed that this aggressive corporate messaging must go undiscussed. The powers that be at MSNBC have made the same decision.

Fox News assails MSNBC's hosts; MSNBC cowers and hides. Clownishly, Variety bowed to the same ridiculous "comedy" dodge when it published its recent long, delusional profile of the bizarre Greg Gutfeld himself.

In her personal life, Compagno may be the world's nicest person. That said, she belongs on a "cable news" show the same way we belong up front in the Bolshoi Ballet. 

She misstated wildly last Tuesday night, leading to the mandated assessment. But as she continued, we'd have to say that she redeemed herself with a later statement.

She spoke about one of the ways we Blues have enabled President Trump.  We Blues have done that in various ways. At the end of this hundred days, should the bell be tolling for us? 

Does the president want to stage his parade? The AP's report doesn't attempt to settle that question.

Meanwhile, we Blues have enabled his rise in various ways. That forty percent should be good enough!

We'll start with that topic on Monday.