THE DAY AFTER Donald Trump’s election victory last November, Alexandros Marinos, a COVID-19 “dissenter” and minor figure in the “heterodox” community, posted this challenge to Trump opponents:

As the second Trump presidency nears the 100-day mark, it’s instructive to look back at the challenge Marinos posed in his tweet. How has Trump’s actual record so far measured up to the dark scenarios anticipated by those of us who thought his victory would be a disaster?

Let’s go through each of the biggest concerns of anti-Trumpers.

We are already in a de facto constitutional crisis with the Trump administration, and Trump himself, ignoring court rulings, including a 9–0 Supreme Court ruling directing the administration to “facilitate” the return of unlawfully deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia (though so far, Trump has tried weasel around the order—“that’s not what my people told me!”—instead of openly defying it). Trump, administration officials, and Elon Musk have also repeatedly railed at the power of the courts to curb the executive. The arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan for supposedly helping an illegal immigrant defendant in her courtroom evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looks very much like a power move intended to ramp up intimidation of the judiciary. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have been forced to resign because they wouldn’t go along with orders to drop the bribery and fraud case against New York mayor and newly minted Trump pal Eric Adams.

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Not particularly hard to predict, given that pre-election, Trump had been saying things like “I am your retribution” and amplifying calls for “televised military tribunals” for former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and former Vice President Mike Pence. So far, he has issued executive orders targeting law firms that have crossed him—such as Covington and Burling, which represents former special counsel Jack Smith, and Susman Godfrey, which has successfully represented Dominion Voting Systems in defamation lawsuits over accusations of election malfeasance. And most recently, he has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency in the first Trump administration. Krebs’s offense? He “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”

Again, predictable, since Trump had referred to them as “hostages” and “patriots” on the campaign trail and promised to free them as soon as he took office—but I admit I was still shocked by the blanket pardon for all the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack, including ones who had viciously assaulted cops. What’s more, the Justice Department has decided that Trump’s clemency also covers other charges stemming from the January 6th cases, such as illegal possession of weapons found during searches.

Pre-election, Trump had repeatedly suggested yanking the licenses of television networks that had displeased him—and filed an absurd lawsuit against CBS’s 60 Minutes for supposedly biased editing of Kamala Harris’s interview. After the election but before his inauguration, he also sued the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer for “election interference” for publishing a poll that showed Harris winning Iowa.

More recently, Trump has publicly urged Brendan Carr, his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, to investigate CBS over two 60 Minutes segments (on Ukraine and on Greenland) that irked him. There is, of course, nothing to investigate. But the move increases pressure on CBS’s corporate owner, Paramount, to play nice if it wants FCC approval for a pending merger. The resignation of 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens last week is an ominous sign.

As bad as the first-term family separations were, Trump 2.0 has already managed to eclipse them by shipping off migrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. We don’t know how many of those deportees are actually associated with “terrorist” gangs, but it’s a fact that virtually none have criminal records in the United States. (Not on my bingo card: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem making a cruelty-porn video of herself strutting against a backdrop of half-naked inmates at the Salvadoran gulag.) Add to that U.S. citizen children—some of them cancer patients—deported with their migrant parents and Afghan Christian refugees facing deportation into the clutches of the Taliban, and this administration is well on track to exceeding its critics’ worst fears.

Add, too, creepy arrests and deportation proceedings against foreign students accused of pro-Hamas activism, sometimes on the shockingly flimsy basis of an op-ed denouncing Israel’s war in Gaza. (Probably not on anyone’s bingo card: a bizarre move, subsequently reversed after court challenges, to revoke the visas of hundreds of international students for trivial offenses like old traffic violations—or for arrests that did not result in conviction.)

Unsurprisingly, U.S. citizens have been affected too. Some have been detained by ICE on suspicion of being here illegally (with a clear pattern of racial profiling of Hispanics). Also, because Trump has invoked an eighteenth-century law to classify Venezuelan migrants suspected of gang membership as alien invaders, the administration ordered federal agents to enter U.S. citizens’ homes without a warrant in search of Venezuelan gangbangers. The warnings that mass deportations would require a de facto police state are rapidly being vindicated.

Oh boy. Many of us hoped that on this issue, at least, people from the GOP’s more conventional business wing would be able to rein in our mad king. Instead, we got a rollercoaster of on-and-off tariff threats followed by the madness of “Liberation Day” of April 2, cratering stocks, confused messaging from Trump and his team (the tariffs will bring in so much money they’ll replace income taxes! the goal is to bring the tariffs down to zero after negotiating great trade deals!), and presidential bluster followed by an apparent walkback, but with some damage to the supply chain already done. Economists are warning about the possibility of empty shelves and layoffs, retailers are freaking out, and Trump is no longer railing against “panicans.” If your “worst fears” list included a self-induced financial crisis and recession, there’s a good chance you’ll be checking it off.

Make that self-destruction, with a bizarre combination of isolationism and imperialism that has quickly alienated our allies. I’ll bet that hardly anyone’s list of fears included a Trump obsession with acquiring Greenland and Panama (maybe by military force), or endless rants and taunts (serious or trolling, who knows?) about making Canada our “51st state.” One thing is abundantly clear to the world: Donald Trump’s America is not a reliable ally or partner to anyone. On top of that, the Trump administration has been eviscerating America’s soft power by closing the United States Agency for International Development and trying to shut down Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Some Ukraine-watchers say that it could have been worse, since Trump hasn’t shut off the aid already allocated or permanently cut off intelligence-sharing. But Trump’s “peacemaking” has been an utter fiasco that, most of the time, has played into Vladimir Putin’s hands. Aid deliveries and intel-sharing were paused in early March after Trump and Vice President JD Vance had an Oval Office tantrum about Volodymyr Zelensky saying mean words about Vladimir Putin. Now Trump is apparently poised to recognize Crimea as officially Russian—though he’s also made some anti-Putin noises in the last few days after Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities. But so far, Trump’s combination of friendly overtures and toothless threats is clearly emboldening the Kremlin, and the only question is whether Trump is knowingly pro-Russian or simply a useful idiot.

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Trump’s campaign promise to let anti-vaccine conspiracy loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health was bad enough; at the time, I thought he would make RFK Jr. a “health czar” because I could not imagine that the Senate, even Republican-dominated, would ever confirm this man as the head of an actual federal agency. Now, after putting on a mainstream act during the confirmation hearings, our new secretary of health and human services is launching a study that he pledges will get to the bottom of the autism “epidemic” by September—under the leadership of vaccine skeptic David Geier, a vaccine skeptic with a history of dubious practices. While RFK Jr. has grudgingly endorsed the measles vaccine in response to a multistate outbreak, he has also continued to make ill-informed statements that cast doubt on its effectiveness. The HHS secretary spreading dangerous medical misinformation is something that even most of us folks with Trump Derangement Syndrome would not have predicted.

Trump critics were certainly concerned about this prospect, but the extent of the insane clown show is still appalling. Tulsi Gabbard—whose past flirtations with the Syrian and Russian regimes would have once made it difficult for her to get a security clearance—as director of national intelligence? Kash Patel, the man with fantasies of vendettas against Trump foes, as FBI director? Far-right podcaster and January 6th conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino as FBI deputy director? Ed Martin, a frequent guest on Russia’s RT and Sputnik propaganda outlets, as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and Trump’s pick to fill that role full-time? Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News personality with a trail of Christian nationalist, Trump-worshipping writings as well as a history of alcoholism, extramarital affairs, and alleged abusive behavior toward women, as secretary of defense? Who, prior to the election, could have imagined a scandal around the SecDef discussing sensitive military information in Signal chats from a phone number that is apparently all over the internet?

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The fact that MAGA world is floating the idea to such an extent that the official Trump store is now selling “Trump 2028” merchandise with a call to “rewrite the rules,” while Trump is musing about “loopholes” to the Twenty-second Amendment and talks about being “inundated with requests” is, well . . . “disturbing” doesn’t begin to cover it.

But perhaps this roundup of the sum of all fears can end on an optimistic note. Many of us did fear something that, so far, does not seem to have panned out: that America’s weird love affair with Trump is so dysfunctional it will be impervious to Trump’s real-life failures. In fact, he’s tankingin the polls, badly. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

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