For the last one hundred days, President Donald Trump has given us every indication that he intends to go down in history as a great president. One defined not by his sense of American exceptionalism or job approval, but rather his own God-given mission to “Make America Great Again.”

For one hundred days, he has forgone friendship with our allies, old and new. He joked about making Canada the 51st state, inadvertently undermining the Canadian Conservative Party’s efforts to take back the government just last week. 

He used the Oval Office as a backdrop to mock and berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on international television, asserting that the miracle of his country’s endurance over the last three years is not only contributing to the outbreak of World War III, but that the war-torn leader didn’t have the “cards” to carry on.

He promised us a “Liberation Day,” to take credit only for the “good parts” of the economy and “deals” that never came to fruition. And lest we forget about his planned Gaza “Riviera” for his hotelier friends from a previous life.

To know America’s place in the world today is to know Trump — a president and a person made great by a brand built long ago that now seems to fail, over and over, to live up to the size of the letters on the buildings.

He has made the presidency empty and our nation a shallow place, where free thought is a side effect of the “woke mind virus,” charity is decried as “waste, fraud and abuse” and people are rendered mute or, worse, complicit in the destruction of the American promise.

Four decades after President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” the wealthiest man in the world took a chainsaw to our bureaucracy, upending the livelihoods of civil servants with enough time leftover to sell cars on the South Lawn.

Trumponomics manifest themselves in empty shelves, plunging stock portfolios and an emerging recession. His promise to make our country safer resulted in an “administrative error” that condemned a Maryland father to a Salvadoran supermax prison.

He attacks universities in the name of fighting antisemitism, yet renders Jewish students like myself voiceless in a fight that ought to belong to us.

Every societal function has been made in the MAGA image over the last one hundred days. From the abstruse government agency to the school board to the way you have been made to feel turned off by politics entirely, the culture of MAGA has upended nearly every aspect of the ways we have governed ourselves for the last decade.

I am not worried about Trump’s tendency to disregard the Constitution in interviews or that those around him are exploring options for a third term. 

What I worry about is the fact that for the last one hundred days we have suppressed the emotions that previously drove us to make change.

We are not in the streets. We are not putting pressure on them. We are not making their decisions harder. As they deport students for protesting last spring, somehow we can’t find it in us to protest today. 

The empty executive orders signed by Trump every week were never the point. Resetting the way we think about politics and, indeed, how we interact with each other over them is how Trump intended to “Make America Great Again.”

Former Kennedy Center Chair David Rubenstein recently said on a book tour I attended that people usually want to become president because they think they can do something “good” for the country.

But today, the lesson from Trump after the first one hundred days of his second term is that he never thought he had anything “good” to contribute to this country, so he’s making a new one. All for himself.

In the next one hundred days, let us find those emotions we have bottled up for this very moment. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said it best last week when he declared that it is time for mass protest. 

For mobilization. For disruption. 

Every day we avoid the news is another victory for Trump and his new, “great” America. It is our civic duty to control the narrative now. For the sake of our democracy, yes, but even more so for the memory of a country once built in our image, not his.

Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.