News
Analysis
After the
Arrests and Bullets, Trump Takes on Second Term With a New Fervor
Having
escaped prison and death, President Trump has returned to power seeking
vindication and vengeance — and done more in his first 100 days to change the
trajectory of the country than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
President
Trump has acted like a man on a mission in the opening chapter of this new
term, moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to
bottom and exact retribution against enemies at the same time.
Peter Baker
By Peter
Baker
Peter Baker,
the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency and wrote
a book about President Trump’s first term. He reported from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/us/politics/trump-100-days-second-term.html
April 30,
2025
At the
entrance of the Oval Office, where the president and his visitors can see it
every day, hangs the mug shot taken of a glowering Donald J. Trump after being
arrested and charged with racketeering to overthrow an election.
A couple of
hundred feet away, in the grand foyer of the White House state floor where the
official portraits of past presidents in solemn poses are on display, hangs a
painting of a defiant Mr. Trump, blood splattered on his face by would-be
assassin’s bullet, angrily pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight!”
These icons
of Mr. Trump’s journey back to power loom large as he completes the first 100
days of his second presidency. There is a reason he has placed these images in
positions of prominence. They reflect the crucibles of a man who escaped
existential threats of prison and death in his quest for vindication and
vengeance. They fuel his self-authored narrative as a man of destiny, saved by
God to save America.
In the
opening chapter of this new term, Mr. Trump has acted like a man on a mission,
moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to bottom and
exact retribution against enemies at the same time. He appears intent on
demolishing the old order no matter the collateral damage, putting his personal
imprint not just on government and foreign affairs but on almost every aspect
of national life, including business, culture, sports, academia, the legal
world and the media.
Through
sheer force of will and brazen assertions of presidential power, Mr. Trump has
done more to change the trajectory of the country in three months than any
president since Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the notion of a first-100-days
presidential yardstick. But where Roosevelt used his early weeks to build a new
edifice, Mr. Trump has used his to tear it down. In effect, he is trying to
repeal the liberal social compact and international system that Roosevelt
constructed, “unwinding neoliberalism,” as one aide put it.
Nearly every
day brings a fresh breach of what were once thought to be the rules, moves that
have thrilled his insurgent supporters and petrified his nervous opponents. In
his own telling, Mr. Trump is putting America on the path to the “golden age”
that he promised in his inaugural address, while his adversaries fear that it
is instead the path to a new dark age of autocracy, repression and upheaval.
These first
100 days have been far more ambitious than the first 100 days eight years ago
when Mr. Trump came into office a governing novice who, by his own later
account, did not know how to be president. That was before the re-election
defeat, before the indictments and trials, before the shooters. Now the scar
tissue is deep, the guardrails are gone and the sense of righteous mandate is
palpable.
“He is very
laser focused on what he wants to accomplish,” said Robert Jeffress, the Dallas
evangelical pastor, who joined the president at an Easter dinner at the White
House this month. The trials and tribulations of the past few years, including
the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., took time to process, Mr.
Jeffress added. “But I think he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion —
that God has a purpose for him.”
It has been
an action-packed 100-day sprint of remarkable grandiosity and vindictiveness.
In his war on the so-called deep state that he blames in part for his ordeals
of the past few years, Mr. Trump has ripped through the federal government with
cyclone force, dismantling government agencies, eliminating diversity programs,
gutting climate change initiatives, firing tens of thousands of workers,
slashing spending on foreign aid and scientific research, installing partisan
warriors at the Justice Department and F.B.I. and purging the top uniformed
military leadership.
He has
cracked down on immigration, bringing crossings at the border to historic lows
even as his agents have defied courts in deporting migrants who were in the
country both illegally and legally. He has put pressure on law firms,
universities, news outlets and sports leagues to change policies to suit his
wishes. Adopting a new “manifest destiny,” he has coveted territory in
Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and even war-torn Gaza.
He has gone
after his critics much as he vowed to do, ordering Justice Department
investigations of specific adversaries by name, stripping security details from
former officials facing death threats, firing government officials who crossed
him or even just went to the wedding of someone who had crossed him.
No issue
appears too small for him to address if it piques his interest, including
plastic straws, shower pressure and the lineup at the Kennedy Center. At the
same time, he and his family have profited significantly off the presidency
through business ventures, cryptocurrency and a promotional documentary about
Melania Trump.
But some of
the president’s most high-profile initiatives either have yet to bear fruit,
early as it is, or have generated enormous tumult. Mr. Trump has failed so far
to make peace in either Ukraine or Gaza despite having boasted about how easy
it would be. He has failed to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day
1.”
Instead, in
an audacious bid to restructure the global economy, he sent markets plunging
and wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth by declaring a trade war on allies
and adversaries alike. While Roosevelt embarked on a 100-day flurry of action
in an effort to end a Great Depression, economists warn that Mr. Trump’s
100-day flurry of action risks starting one. The famously impatient president
counsels patience, promising that the resulting new trade deals will ultimately
benefit the country. But either way, the international economic system will
never be the same.
“This time
he appears super-driven,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax
Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s. “I’m not sure it’s because of the finality
of a second term, that he has a G.O.P. Congress or perhaps his age, but he
wants to get everything done yesterday.”
While even
Mr. Trump was surprised that he won his first election eight years ago, this
time he and his team had plenty of time after his 2020 re-election defeat to
map out what they would do if they took back the reins of power, crafting
blueprints like Project 2025.
“He had four
years to think through what he wanted to do and what he didn’t want to do next
time around,” Mr. Jeffress said. “Those four years gave him an opportunity to
plan and look to the future and explain why he hit the ground running.”
Unlike
Roosevelt and every president who followed, however, Mr. Trump has relied
mainly on executive authority rather than trying to pass legislation through
Congress. Roosevelt set the standard when he took office in 1933 in the teeth
of the Great Depression, pushing through 15 landmark pieces of legislation in
those epic 100 days.
Overall,
Roosevelt signed 76 bills into law in that period, more than any of his
successors, while Mr. Trump has signed just five, the lowest of any president
since then. By contrast, Mr. Trump has signed a whopping 142 executive orders,
more than three times the 42 that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in his
first 100 days in 2021.
The lack of
major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even
bothered to try. Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of
Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far, other than
seeking a giant package of spending and tax cuts that is only just starting to
make its way through the House and Senate. Executive orders feed his appetite
for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and
time-consuming negotiations.
But the
price of instant action could be failure to bring about sustained change. Bills
passed by Congress and signed by a president become the law of the land for
years if not decades to come, while executive orders can simply be repealed by
the next president.
“F.D.R.’s
accomplishments were enduring,” said H.W. Brands, a Roosevelt biographer at the
University of Texas at Austin. “The Supreme Court overturned some but they were
revised and reinstated. Most are with us still. Trump’s accomplishments, so
far, can be undone by mere strokes of the pens of his successors.”
At the same
time, Mr. Trump has claimed authority to act that his predecessors never
imagined they had, setting off an escalating battle with the courts, which as
of Monday had ruled at least 123 times to at least temporarily pause actions by
the new administration that might be illegal or unconstitutional.
Mr. Trump
has issued increasingly menacing threats against judges who dare to block him,
and in one case his F.B.I. agents even handcuffed and arrested a county judge
accused of obstructing his immigration crackdown.
“These first
hundred days have been historic, not because of how much of his agenda he has
achieved, but because of how much damage he has done to democratic institutions
and state capacity in his effort to wield an unprecedented amount of executive
power,” said Nicole Hemmer, director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers
Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Roosevelt
too expanded executive power, but in the early days at least he did so in
tandem with Congress, which empowered him to respond to the crisis afflicting
the country. In the process, he designed a domestic architecture that broadened
the federal government’s role in society just as he would later fashion a new
American-led international system that would last for generations.
“On the
simplest level, I can’t think of any first hundred days in the modern era as
consequential as Roosevelt’s and Trump’s for their sheer impact on the life of
the nation,” said Marc Selverstone, director of presidential studies at the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center. In effect, he said, the two presidents
“will serve as bookends to a defined era in constitutional governance.”
But after
swinging to extremes, Mr. Selverstone said, the system has a way of adjusting.
“If history provides any guide here, the rebalancing will come,” he said. “The
question is how much pain we’ll have to endure until the constitutional order
finds a more stable equilibrium that commands broad assent from the public.”
Mr. Trump
makes no apologies for pushing the boundaries of his power or ignoring
lawmakers as he seeks to enact his agenda. “Rather than passing the buck to
Congress, which we know moves too slowly sometimes, the president is taking any
and all executive action he can to deliver on the promises he made,” said
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, while noting that he was
still working with lawmakers to pass tax cuts and finance border security.
But Ms.
Leavitt denied that Mr. Trump was crossing lines. “We wholeheartedly reject
that the president is defying his constitutional authority or legal
obligations,” she said in an interview. “Every executive order the president
has signed has been legally and carefully crafted to ensure it’s well within
his executive and constitutional authority.”
Ms. Leavitt
said that in his frenetic 100 days so far, Mr. Trump has been motivated by the
searing experiences of recent years. “The president has faced an incredible
amount of adversity to return to the White House and surely we all think about
that every day and remind ourselves of how much it took to get back here,” she
said. “The president is in full-blown problem solver mode. He is a man on a
mission to solve the country and the world’s problems, no matter how big or
small.”
But while
Mr. Trump claims a mandate from both God and voters, the voters, at least, are
not so sure. He finishes his first 100 days with less public support than any
president in the history of polling at this stage. Just 42 percent of voters
approved of his performance in a survey by The New York Times and Siena College
that found Americans using words like “chaotic” and “scary” to describe his
tenure so far.
Mr. Trump
has never been a popular president, even though he plays one on television.
Although he won the Electoral College in 2016, he lost the popular vote. While
he edged out Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points in 2024, he
fell just short of 50 percent. He has never had the approval of a majority of
voters in any Gallup poll in his first or second terms, unlike any president
going back to Roosevelt.
The polls so
far have not constrained him, nor have his advisers or allies. For all the talk
of a more disciplined operation this time around, shouting matches in the West
Wing speak to the rifts and rivalries that mark the second term. But this team
includes more enablers and ideologues advancing Mr. Trump’s agenda, and fewer
figures like, in his first term, the economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin, willing or able to tamp down his most radical
instincts.
“What’s
changed is all the people around him,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a onetime
friend of Mr. Trump’s who served briefly as White House communications director
during the first term and has since become a critic. “The stuff he’s doing
right now were 2018 ideas, but he didn’t have the people around him to do it.
He would have done everything he’s doing now seven years ago, but Gary Cohn
said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ Mnuchin said, ‘I’m not doing that.’”
Mr. Trump
makes a point of never admitting mistakes, seeing that as a sign of weakness,
but the lesson he took from that first term was to shed those who might get in
the way. He has a better sense now of how to wield power and a greater
willingness to do so regardless of objections. He sees himself as a singular
figure not just for the present day but in the stream of history.
And so the
self-described man of destiny pushes forward without as much resistance,
pushing to rid the country of millions of immigrants, pushing to eradicate
“woke culture,” pushing to upend the global economy, pushing to punish those
standing in his way, pushing to expand America’s borders and unravel its
economic and security alliances. Pushing, pushing, pushing.
He looks up
most days and sees that mug shot and maybe passes that painting with the blood
on his face and he knows what could have been. By all accounts, for good or
ill, he has changed the country in just 100 days. Under the Constitution, he
has 1,361 more to go.
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth
presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and
their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
A version of
this article appears in print on April 30, 2025, Section A, Page 16 o
