Pretty much dead on.
Everyone observing politics seems to agree on two things about a president’s first 100 days in office:
1. 100 days is a meaningless, arbitrary marker for a president’s performance that is likely to be more misleading than useful.
and…
2. Let’s treat it like it is important! Reeeeeeee!
The thing that fascinates me the most about this situation is that the so-called “pro-science” people are giving Trump low grades for his first 100 days.
Allow me to connect some dots.
In science, you don’t have much of an experiment unless you have a
control case for comparison. For example, you can’t know if a drug helped with a particular disease unless you study the people who didn’t take the drug at the same time as those who did.
But the pro-science people forget this concept when thinking about politics. Where is the control case for Trump’s first 100 days?
Is it George Washington’s first 100 days?
Is it Jimmy Carter’s first 100 days?
And which prior president came to office in 2017 with identical problems and the most polarized political environment in history?
And just how long is it
supposed to take to revise Obamacare? Do we compare it to the time Abe Lincoln repealed and replaced Obamacare? Or how about the time those other presidents repealed and replaced Obamacare in the year 2017?
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