The one thing that says everything about Trump’s first 100 days | Opinion
I’ve never much cared for the 100-day presidential milestone. It’s a contrived marker usually with little significance. But this time feels different, given the fast-paced descent into anti-democracy during the second Trump presidency.
There has been much to digest in so little time, making it difficult to encapsulate just what that change has been, or where we’re headed as a nation. The Trump administration is apparently adhering to the Steve Bannon doctrine of “flooding the zone” to make it impossible for the public to focus on any event long enough to understand its long-term repercussions.
Donald Trump’s blinded supporters have been busy pretending he is just another president. They bombard us with frequent reminders of the past misdeeds of his predecessors to convince us there’s nothing for which we should be concerned.
We can’t afford to let that falsehood become the dominant narrative even while we acknowledge that no president has been perfect, and that some have committed quite awful acts. President Joe Biden’s stewardship over our role in the still-ongoing Gaza war bordered on the criminal, for instance.
Trump wants you to blame Biden, who is no longer in power, for bad economic results or think only of the “good” things Trump believes he’s accomplished.
But if you remember nothing else about this era, you must never forget what’s happening in Lowndes County, Alabama. It illustrates the character of this president like nothing else has during his first 100 days, and is the tenor of things we should expect for the rest of Trump’s second term.
Lowndes is a majority-Black county whose origins stretch back directly to slavery. It was formed in 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, when Black people were allowed to purchase land through the Southern Homestead Act. Most of those land purchases were in environmentally-unsafe areas, activist Catherine Coleman Flowers told NBC News.
The act was signed into law four years after the much-better-known Homestead Act, a law which all but excluded Black people while handing roughly 270 million acres of free land to white people. An estimated 20 million white Americans still benefit from the Homestead Act.
The residents of Lowndes are being affected by the Southern Homestead Act in a different way. They must contend with human wastewater in their homes and yards because of what Biden’s Department of Justice said amounted to environmental racism.
It’s gotten so bad over the years, a 2017 study found that about a third of the adults in the county suffered from an intestinal parasite known as the hookworm.
The Biden administration allocated $26 million to improve the county’s infrastructure to save lives, improve others and right a centuries-long wrong inflicted by the government. The state of Alabama didn’t step up to help Americans in need, so the federal government filled that void.
The project was under way until Trump signed an executive order killing it. Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights said the project was just supposedly harmful “DEI.” I don’t know if evil is the right word to describe such a statement, but it doesn’t feel far off.
The Trump administration is so hell bent on reshaping the country in its ideological image, it is willing to lie about diversity, equity and inclusion programs even if it means directly endangering the lives of a vulnerable group of fellow Americans. It’s cruel and revealing.
It’s an extreme example of the administration’s anti-Blackness — which has always been the camel’s nose under the tent for other forms of discrimination and cruelty. It makes it easier to cut FEMA funding while western North Carolina tries to recover from Hurricane Helene. It makes it easier to ban books that make young people aware of the legacy of slavery that still shows up in places such as Lowndes County. It makes it easier to deport medically-compromised toddlers and cut a billion dollars in federal grants from mental health funding.
The 100-day mark doesn’t much matter. But it is sobering to imagine how much more damage Trump can inflict in the next three years given the damage he’s inflicted the past three months.
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The one thing that says everything about Trump’s first 100 days | Opinion."