For us denizens of the Colorado State Capitol, the number 120 has something of a magical property attached to it. I’m sure some scholar or historian out there knows the reason why 120 days was selected as the (usually) constitutionally enforced length of time for the General Assembly to meet and do its worst each year (I’ve never bothered to look that datum up), but in any case, Day 120 is welcomed with a sense of relieved elation by most of those who make their livings on the marbled floors and brass rails of that aesthetically beautiful building, sort of like St. Patrick’s, VE Day and the Fourth of July rolled into one.

The best that can be said about this just-expired legislative session: It could have been much, much worse. Don’t get me wrong, it was still bad — but not quite as bad as it could have been. This is what now passes for optimism in the Centennial State.

Though 120 has at least constitutional — and emotional — meaning in Colorado, there is nothing particularly magical about the number 100, aside from its almost aesthetical roundness as a figure. For whatever reason, 100 days has become the established benchmark for evaluating a presidency. Candidates blather on ad nauseum about the grand accomplishments they will achieve in their “First hundred days”; press secretaries tout whichever presidents’ accomplishments in those first 100 days, whether they accomplished anything or not; and us pundits make a great deal of whatever happened or didn’t in those 100 days, because… well, it’s a hundred days right?

So how has President Donald Trump fared in his first five score days? I think the best that can be said is this: when Trump is good, he’s terrific; when he’s bad he’s catastrophic.

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Allister Heath in The Telegraph put it rather nicely: “Donald Trump is neither the Messiah nor the Devil. The sycophants and the haters are equally wrong. The reality is nuanced. There is a benign Trump, and a malign Trump, and both coexist uneasily within the president’s persona.”   

Heath continues: “He is spectacularly right on some issues, and dangerously wrong on others. He is an exceptional figure who will mold America for a generation, but his solipsism, loose relationship with the facts and excessive respect for strongmen is encouraging him to gamble with the fate of the free world.”

That about sums it up. I have been rather hard on the president in this space where I think he deserves it, but it is equally worth pointing out where he has been right, he has been very right. For instance, his administration’s emphasis on arresting the extremist excesses of cultural radicalism (commonly expressed by the syntactically-irritating term “woke”) has been especially welcome. His official admonishment of publicly funded universities’ indulgence of that agenda, which had grown to the point of cultivating violent antisemitism on campus, has been particularly encouraging.

He has been similarly right on immigration and the border, issues for which he was, in large part, elected. Ditto on domestic energy production, dismantlement of the regulatory state and the general desire to reduce the size of the federal government. He has also had a few successes in foreign policy, at least in the Middle East, where he has been for more supportive of Israel than his predecessor, and stepped up military action against the Houthis, action which seems at this point to have driven the bastards to surrender.

Some of these come with some caveats of course: though immigration enforcement is welcome and long overdue, the administration needs to make sure it is not breaking the law in the pursuit of enforcing it; this means obeying court orders even when it doesn’t agree — something the Biden administration wasn’t keen on doing either. If ideological lower-court judges get it wrong, the higher courts will apply the law properly. Concerning government reduction efforts, such as DOGE, care must be taken to ensure it is done prudently, because the effort is far too important to mess up by exercising amateurish recklessness.

As for the bad, those are some of the big-ticket items. The tariffs are going to impose their injuries on the economy for some time, which will not help Republicans in the midterms. In Ukraine, Trump’s “peace at any cost” approach could have generational impacts, as will his professed abandonment of American leadership of the West. Even here, some caveats are present — the just announced trade deal with the United Kingdom is gratifying, and a vindication of Brexit; and reality seems to be settling in a bit as the administration realizes, somewhat belatedly, that Russia may in fact be the bad guy. Hey, the Democrats finally came around, perhaps Trump will.

It’s quite simple: the president deserves the support and backing of conservatives when he is right; he deserves their opposition and animadversions when he is wrong. The alternative, in either direction, is demagogy, and that helps no one.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.