First 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency

First 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency are treated in the book as a decisive early measure of both the administration and the political coalition that brought it to power. The period is framed not as an ordinary honeymoon but as the moment when a billionaire plutocrat's promise to oppose the elite collides with his identity as a leading member of that elite, producing disrepute, low approval, and a crisis of political credibility.

Political Identity and Background

The book places the first hundred days within a broader conflict between the 1% or Ownership Class and the 99%. Its account begins from the claim that power belongs to a wealthy elite able to make the majority serve its interests. Drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master–slave dialectic, it describes domination as a relationship in which one side risks everything to seize power while the other accepts subordination in order to preserve life. The book then applies this model to the Ownership Class, portraying its members as unusually willing to take risks, use force, and defeat opponents in pursuit of power.

Donald Trump is made the central example of the contradiction. The book emphasizes that, by his own estimation, he was worth more than ten billion dollars and possessed a vast property portfolio, while refusing to disclose his tax affairs to the people over whom he presided. On this account, placing him in the White House could not plausibly be understood as an attack on the Ownership Class: it placed one of its most prominent members at the center of government. The first hundred days therefore inherit a basic interpretive dispute. Trump supporters speak in the language of rebellion against the elite, while the book sees the presidency as the elevation of a plutocrat who is structurally part of the elite.

The Trump Insurgency and Its Historical Frame

The book calls the Trump insurgency “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” presenting it as a return to far-right conservative rule founded on racism, white supremacy, and extreme plutocracy. It also compares the political development to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, treating the comparison as a sign that a reactionary vision of wealth and power has entered practical politics. The first hundred days thus appear inside a historical and ideological frame rather than as an isolated administrative interval.

This frame extends to the book's account of capitalism and the state. It argues that contemporary right wingers retain the attitude associated with the Confederacy: hostility to government when government taxes wealth or interferes with private economic power, combined with a willingness to permit domination over others. The book interprets the American Civil War as a conflict over the acceptable limits of capitalism and describes slavery as a mechanism for maximizing profit by reducing costs. Against this inheritance, it invokes Abraham Lincoln's use of the positive liberty State to destroy the Confederacy as a physical entity, while calling for a new effort to end the Confederacy as a mental and ideological structure.

Public Reception and Political Contradiction

The period's clearest concrete measure is its approval rating. In the book's account, during his first 100 days in office Donald Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president in more than 70 years. That statistic becomes the basis for a larger judgment: the administration had not merely disappointed a portion of the public but had made the country an object of ridicule and damaged its standing. The text describes Trump as a reality television host in the White House and recasts the nation as a game show that had failed to recognize its own transformation.

The low approval rating is connected to the book's criticism of the voters themselves. It argues that many supporters were driven by ressentiment toward cultural elites in government, universities, and coastal regions, yet directed their anger away from the wealthy people who governed economic life. Their resentment instead targeted groups positioned below them, especially black and Hispanic people. In this interpretation, Trump's appeal depended on a racial hierarchy: supporters could tolerate rule by a rich elite if that elite promised to place white conservatives above non-white groups. The first hundred days therefore function as a test of whether anti-establishment language represented economic revolt or a demand for recognition within an existing hierarchy.

Media, Ideology, and the Meaning of Truth

The book also places the first hundred days within a struggle over information. It labels media criticism of Donald Trump “Fake News” and media praise of him “True News,” presenting this reversal as evidence of a political culture in which truth is subordinated to partisan belief. The surrounding argument condemns the rejection of systems of knowledge whenever they conflict with right-wing, Christian, or predatory-capitalist convictions.

This concern with concealed power is reinforced by the book's discussion of John Carpenter's They Live. The film is described as a story of an elite that engineers economic collapse, ruins the working class, broadcasts a hidden signal, and implants a false consciousness that prevents the masses from seeing reality. The book stresses that Carpenter associated the aliens with yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and intended the film as a denunciation of unrestrained capitalism, not as an attack on Jews or the Illuminati. In this framework, the first hundred days become another episode in the struggle to identify the hidden structure beneath political spectacle: Trump appears to the book not as an outsider who exposes the elite, but as a spectacle through which elite power is made attractive to those who resent it.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The first hundred days leave the book with a deliberately stark conclusion. Donald Trump's early presidency is presented as proof that a political movement can combine hostility to government, reverence for concentrated wealth, racial resentment, and devotion to a billionaire leader while calling itself a movement for freedom. The book describes the majority as “natural-born slaves” when they support a plutocratic billionaire as their leader, and it treats their attachment to the elite as constitutive of their political identity rather than as an accidental error.

The period consequently carries two kinds of significance. Politically, it marks the early failure of Trump's public standing, measured by the lowest approval rating for a president in more than seven decades. Interpretively, it crystallizes the book's central accusation: the supposed insurgency against the elite has installed the elite's own representative while redirecting popular anger toward minorities, government, and cultural opponents. The closing imperative, “Drain the Swamp. Drain the Trump. Dump the Chump,” turns the first hundred days into a demand for repudiation rather than a prelude to reconciliation. In the book's narrative, the early presidency is the point at which the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore: a rebellion advertised as popular emancipation has become, in the author's view, another form of submission to concentrated power.