This is the 100th day of Trump’s second term. Only 1,361 days to go.

Unless you’ve been in a coma since January 20th, this has been three-plus months of chaos. It defines Trump and scares the bejesus out of many Americans regardless of whom they voted for. Nothing like this dysfunctional White House has been seen before, not excepting all our wars, 9-11, the Great Depression, the San Francisco earthquake, Covid, the Chicago fire set off by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over the lantern, the sturm und drang of the stock market, the west Texas, New Mexico (and still spreading) measles outbreak, or whomever or whatever you can think of.

Trump’s disordered persona is not normal, especially in a president. It is chilling. No drama Obama was far better. We have had other troubled presidents. Nixon was a daytime drinker, a troubled man, but nothing close to this. JFK supposedly ran girlfriends through a back door of the White House. Clinton's peccadilloes were enough to bring him down. But he hung on.

A psychiatrist friend, when asked to diagnose Trump — even though he has not examined him  personally— without hesitation described a narcissistic psychopath. Even to the laity, T’s impulsive, mercurial, needy-but- boastful front shields a profoundly insecure figure bent. on vengeance.

His popularity has tanked when compared that of other presidents’ first 100 days. Many who voted for him are now waking up to find out they are already being roundly screwed by the whacky, impulse-driven dismantlement of the federal work force, and the diminution or threatened elimination of key programs upon which they rely.

The assertion that Herr Musk and DOGE are saving trillions, let alone billions, is fable. It will be a long while before we’ll really know the real number but it is expected to be far lower. Moreover, the costs of firing, furloughing, reassigning or otherwise wrecking the federal work force, will ultimately be in the multibillions far more than Herr Musk's boasting. That we do know.

Trump voters are now becoming aware that they may well face dire threats to their Social Security, medical care, education, veterans’ benefits and more. A pending tax cut is a giveaway to the one-tenth of 1%. The effects of the on-again-off-again tariffs — if they stick — is to dump a tax hike on the other 99% because most companies are likely to pass tariffs along to the customers to protect their profits.

The idea that coal is the future, or that manufacturing will return to idle factories, or that the pro-natalist movement set on breeding our way out of a birthrate decline — with the ladies popping out multiple children as child care benefits erode — or that a return to a nation in the time of McKinley, is possible: let not that last keep you up at night. It’s just not going to happen.

Perhaps even worse, beyond Trump himself, there is the Keystone-cop ineptness of his Cabinet picks, starring vax denier Kennedy and good-hair Hegseth. Harbored some hope that Bondi and Rubio would not be terrible. Wrong. The surfeit of blondes, especially the press secretary who is truly annoying (mostly because she lies with a straight face) and the ex-Fox News personalities and the right-to-far-right wing nuts cloud good news.

But there is good news:

1. Bernie and AOC!

2. Tesla stock is in the toilet and sales are way down. Herr Musk is cutting back his DC time, having so greatly pissed off Cabinet secretaries that they are actually fighting back, reclaiming and re-asserting their defined authority and responsibilities.

3.  Go Harvard! Colleges and universities are now organizing broad scale resistance to Trump’s illegal and likely unconstitutional attacks on the First Amendment's free speech protection.

Yet Trump keeps stirring the pot. Only through disarray can he avoid having the index finger point to him. The middle finger would be more like it.

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich