In an interview with Tom Klingenstein on October 18, 2024, then-candidate Trump was asked to describe his potentially incoming administration in one word. Below is the exact exchange:

Klingenstein: I want a one-word answer.
Trump: Go ahead.
Klingenstein: Are you capable of one word?
Trump: Yes. Well, sometimes you… Am I capable? If it’s doable.
Klingenstein: Okay. Kamala says, vote for her, and you’re voting for joy. What’s the one-word counterpart?
Trump: Competence.
Klingenstein: Competence.
Trump: But real competence. Real, real competence, not just, “He’s sort of a competent person.” But no, real competence.

Since the 100-day mark of the new administration passed last week, I have been thinking about whether I can come up with a one-word description for how it has governed. I was initially thinking about the executive orders, almost on a daily basis, one after another, many of them reverting, correcting, or otherwise updating earlier executive orders, the devastating and bordering on ridiculous tariffs on, tariffs off, then again tariffs on, tariffs off policies, DoD secretary Pete Hegseth’s unimaginable disregard to protecting classified or sensitive information by sharing them with his family members and personal lawyer on Signal, the mass firings, then rehiring of some government employees, the admitted mistakes in cancelling various fundings, e.g., for combating the Ebola virus, wrongfully deporting at least one individual to a gulag in El Salvador, sending a threatening letter to Harvard University by mistake, gross mishandling of the measles outbreak in Texas, and many other examples. So, I was tempted to simply use “incompetence” as a single-word description of the new administration’s qualities.

Then I thought of the many falsehoods expressed by the administration officials with straight face, such as random numbers about the price of gas, that egg prices have gone down by %93, that we have the best economy under the new administration, yet if it is bad it is Biden’s economy, AG Pam Bondi claiming in three separate occasions, that the 22 million fentanyl pills seized since the start of the new administration saved 21 million, 119 million, and 258 million lives, and possibly worst of all, Steven Miller (and later the President himself) claiming that the recent ruling of the Supreme Court regarding Abrego Gracia’s case was 9-0 in favor of the government. This last one is pretty incredible; even if you have not read the text of the opinion, by just considering the individual justices’ past opinions or their conservative versus liberal leanings, you can tell that while there is a non-zero probability for even the most conservative/MAGA members of the court (Justice’s Thomas and Alito) to vote against government overreach and extreme power grab, and in favor of the rule of law and due process, there is absolutely zero chance that the liberal justices, and probably even Justice Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts, to go along with the lawlessness in the way that individual was deported without due process, and, by government’s own admission, due to a mistake. So, if the ruling was 5-4 or 6-3, one could probably consider either option for the ruling (in favor of the government or the plaintiff) plausible. But with a 9-0 ruling, there should be no doubt that it is in favor of the plaintiff and against government’s lawlessness in this case. Anyways, considering all of the above, I thought it would be remiss if I did not add the word “deception” to the above description.

Finally, I remembered the shameful theatrics at the White House with the president of El Salvador, where each president claimed lack of authority to release Abrego Garcia from the notorious prison where he was incarcerated with no conviction or even indictment and without any due process, and to return him to the US, and they just shifted the responsibility to the other person. But even worse, they seemed to be having fun doing that, smiling or giggling and showing absolutely no compassion. Or Tom Homan’s stance on deportations, to simply grab whoever they feel might be a criminal or a gang member from the streets and send them to that gulag, and his statement that they do not deserve due process, because some other murderer who happened to be an immigrant, did not afford due process to his victim. So, I decided to add one more word, “cruelty,” to that description.

With everything that the new administration has been doing since taking office, I think it deserves more than one word for an accurate description. So, my three-word description is: “incompetence, deception, and cruelty.”