The first 122 days of Trump

Key Markets report for Thursday, 22 May 2025

Donald Trump has been the President of the United States for 122 days now, and so far, it's been a mixed bag of goods. However, I find that he is probably being judged too harshly, especially by his supporters. The attitude among his supporters reminds me a bit of some people I know when they watch their home teams play football. If the game isn't going as well as they hoped, as they turn hypersensitive to every mistake their team makes, they jump up and down cursing the players and the coach, all with the certain conviction that if only they were in charge, they'd know exactly how to win the game. If their loud words could change things, half the players would be sacked on the spot and the coach might get ten consecutive death penalties, at the very least.

Somehow, when we feel passionate about issues, we seem inclined to unload on the people who are fighting for our side - not because we wish them to fail but because we wish they did better. Only, fighting the fight is very different from being a spectator. Out in the field, even when you've prepared as well as you could, and you're earnestly doing your best, your opponents are also doing your best for their side. There's no predicting the outcome of the encounter; the struggle comes with unpredictable setbacks and the unavoidable 'bad days at the office.' As spectators in politics, we often assume that the President of the United States, supposedly 'the most powerful man in the world,' can simply issue an order, and then the order gets executed. That's not how things really work inside of the organization.

An insider’s glimpse of reality

In a recent interview with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, former senior advisor to the acting Defense Secretary during the first Trump administration, Col. Douglas Macgregor gave us an important glimpse into the realities of how things actually work within the executive branch of the U.S. government. He recounts his own experience in the first seven minutes of this interview:

"In truth, I was there because Donald Trump at the time wanted to extricate us from Afghanistan, as well as from Syria and Iraq. And he knew that despite of his efforts to push us in those directions, the people under him were disloyal to him and had not done anything to facilitate those outcomes. So, then the point was, see what you can do to reduce or eliminate our presence in Europe, which is interesting, we're talking about something less than 90 days [of Macgregor's tenure with the administration] and I said 'well, I think you could do one of those things but not any more.'"

Shortly thereafter, Macgregor went to see Trump:

"I sat at his office and waited in the West Wing and ... he [the acting Defence Secretary] came back and said, 'Alright, this is what you're going to do,' and the focus was really to extricate us from Afghanistan. So then I sat with everybody and it was working for him and I said, if you want to get out it's a very straightforward matter: the President has to write an executive order that directs the withdrawal from Afghanistan. ... So I drafted an executive order ... and he took it, and I guess he loved it ... ultimately they did it, he did sign it ... then all hell breaks loose. The Senate Armed Services Committee, the key members of the Senate, as well as the acting Secretary of Defense... he went crazy and his acting chief of staff was Kash Patel ... and they all were called over to the White House by the end of the day, and finally, Mitch McConnell and I don't know who else was there from the Senate, plus the House, along with the acting SecDef and his Chief of Staff, all said, we can't do this. We just can't - the allies. What will we do about the allies? My answer was, if we leave, the allies will leave. You know, fly them out. Don't ask for permission, you're the Commander in Chief, you're the President of the United States, and you're the leader of NATO. Well, you know - bottom line is, they talked him out of it."

Trump didn't quite give up. Instead, he asked how many troops he could take out and how many should be left behind. He was told that he should leave 5,000 behind. Macgregor said this was all about "the contractors... we're going to keep the money flowing. Ultimately, President Trump, he buckled." So the reality was that Trump wanted to get the US out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and even out of Europe and he brought Col. Macgregor to help him achieve that, but his initiative was frustrated by disloyal members of his staff and by the powerful vested interests of U.S. allies and their lobbyists, as well as the military-industrial complex. They all had a stake in the U.S. remaining in Afghanistan and their interest prevailed over the nation's democratically elected Commander in Chief.

The swamp is tenacious

The circumstances are somewhat different today, but Trump's action will still be torn between powerful interest groups with important stakes in the outcomes of his policy decisions. As we can well appreciate, some of those groups literally want Trump dead and they haven't been shy to let their intentions be known. His administration therefore has to tread through the swamp with caution, which perhaps explains why it has been so difficult to read Trump's true intentions on important issues like Russia/Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, Iran, Canada, Greenland, etc.

That may be why the executive appears clueless and chaotic. For us spectators meanwhile, it would probably be counterproductive to succumb to our passions and wish half his administration sacked and condemn Trump himself to ten consecutive death penalties because they are not delivering exactly as smoothly and as effectively as we might wish them to do.

The bullet we dodged

In fact, unthoughtful criticism of the administration and withdrawal of support could play into the hands of their opponents who are fighting for the continuation of Biden policies on the Middle East, Ukraine, EU, illegal immigration, LGBT+ indoctrination, climate change, energy policy, censorship, globalization and more. We ought to consider the direction in which the U.S. would be going had Kamala Harris won the elections last November. Probably, the US would today resemble Keir Starmer's Britain with escalating repression and immigration at home and unrestrained warmongering abroad.

Rather than judging Trump and his team with undue harshness, his supporters should continue to exert pressure to steer him in the right direction and demand the changes they voted for. After all, it was the exercise in democracy - the people power - that sacked the Autopen administration and put Trump in the Oval Office. Equally, the people power can and should keep on pushing for change by strengthening the administration's resolve, and weakening their opponents' hand.

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