Trump documentary fails to deal with scale of the chaos

With new outrages by the hour, the talking heads and Maga apologists in 'Trump Revolution: 100 Days That Changed the World' won't skewer the US president, writes Phil Harrison

- Phil Harrison

So how have the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 been for you? It's been quite a ride. In the opening three months of his second term as US president, Donald Trump has declared a trade war with the world, enlisted the help of the richest man on the planet to gut America’s federal workforce and destroy its foreign aid programme, threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, started deporting alleged criminals and gang members to El Salvador without trial, described Gaza as “incredible real estate” and accused Ukraine of starting a war with Russia.

Trump is a severe stress test for all manner of institutions. The inner workings of US democratic law failed its course module before Trump was even re-elected, by allowing him to stand again despite inciting an attempted insurrection in 2021. Since then, US legal, political, business, cultural and educational institutions have all largely flunked their biggest tests, and some of those failures are – albeit much too tentatively – documented in Channel 4’s Trump Revolution: 100 Days That Changed the World.

But how about the media? Trump was arguably “sane-washed” by many elements of it during the election campaign. His indiscretions were either minimised or underreported. Is there any chance that a more rigorous examination will take place during his actual term of power? On the basis of this documentary, fronted by Channel 4 News’s Matt Frei, it doesn’t look promising. There’s a key issue that the one-off episode neglects: the fact that none of this is normal.