In his first three weeks back in office, President Trump has set a dizzying pace of political and social change, issuing dozens of executive directives meant to dramatically remake the federal government and drive the country in a new direction.
Mr. Trump has continued his pursuit of an America First agenda through selective trade tariffs. At the same time, he has looked beyond American shores in proposing the forced relocations of Palestinians from Gaza to make way for redevelopment. And a fuller picture has emerged of Mr. Trump’s partnership with Elon Musk, a billionaire private citizen, who is barreling ahead with shrinking the government work force.
In some ways, the flurry of striking changes has hardened the fault lines dividing those who strongly support and those who strongly oppose the president. Many more in the middle have adopted a wait-and-see approach.
During Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, we will be keeping in touch with a small group of voters — who have diverse political ideologies — to document their impressions of his second term. Here’s what six had to say.
“Sometimes you don’t know who is talking — it feels like a tantrum of a 4-year-old boy.”
Tali Jackont, 57, from Los Angeles
Tali Jackont put aside her liberal beliefs to vote for Mr. Trump, but now she worries.
After four years away from the White House, Mr. Trump seems less temperate than ever.
“Too much ego,” she said on Thursday, adding, “It feels like a tantrum of a four-year-old boy.”
Speaking from her home in the Los Angeles area, Ms. Jackont said that while she understands Mr. Trump’s desire to cut the federal work force and surround himself with loyalists, his tactics do not feel right. Too many experts will lose their jobs, she said. Mr. Trump, she believes, is making moves that make him seem one step removed from being “a type of dictator.”
Ms. Jackont is an educator, a married mother of three sons and an immigrant from Israel. She hoped that Mr. Trump could navigate issues in the Middle East better than his predecessor. But she has watched with bewilderment as he proposed the United States take over Gaza and permanently move the Palestinians living there to other countries.
“Not realistic,” she called Mr. Trump’s idea.
The president has also threatened “all hell” if every hostage is not released.
“It makes me super concerned,” she said. “It makes me feel my heart beat.” If even one of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas is killed because of such rhetoric, she added, “then it does not work for me.”
Elon Musk’s influence with the new administration, his access to federal databases, and the lack of transparency surrounding both give her pause. “It’s like airport security,” she said. “You go through the scanners, they see everything. You’re naked before them, and you don’t know what they’re going to do.”
Despite her concerns, she still has hope for Mr. Trump’s presidency. But she underscored how long she is willing to wait.
One hundred days.
“One hundred days of charity,” she said.
‘This is exactly what I expected — that unexpected things would happen.’
Hamid Chaudhry, 53, from Reading, Pa.
“Look, canceling the penny is the smartest thing he has done,” said Hamid Chaudhry, who owns a farmer’s market in Reading, Pa.
This sort of presidential action — directing the mint to stop making the penny, citing the costs of production — is exactly why Mr. Chaudhry, 53, voted for Mr. Trump last year in the first place. He saw Mr. Trump as a savvy businessman who would save taxpayer money.
Along those lines, Mr. Chaudhry said he supported the plans to bring federal workers back to the office and to cut the size of government. He considers Mr. Musk a smart and accomplished businessman as well.
If Mr. Chaudhry is generally on board with the fiscal decisions of the new administration, he is a little nervous about the speed of some of this cutting. “As a private businessman, they all make sense, but I’m not sure all the changes can be made or should be made too fast,” he said. “I hope we don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”
Still, he remains cautiously optimistic. Not because he agrees with everything Mr. Trump has done — he doesn’t — but because he believes Mr. Trump is bringing a much-needed shake-up to the way things have been done. He is hopeful that Mr. Trump’s approach may pay off, even if there are mistakes along the way.
“When I started making doughnuts in my full-service restaurant, people said, ‘Oh, doughnuts are not going to work and fried chicken is not going to work,’” Mr. Chaudhry said. “The two most popular items in my restaurant are fried chicken and doughnuts. So sometimes you have to think outside the box.”
Mr. Musk ‘seemed like he was almost a guy directly in control of the White House.’
Dave Abdallah, 59, from Dearborn Heights, Mich.
With so much rapid change coming from the White House in the first weeks of Mr. Trump’s administration, one figure has become a particularly influential presence: Mr. Musk.
Dave Abdallah, a Detroit-area real estate broker, is no fan of Mr. Musk’s level of influence. He believes the tech mogul is brazenly crossing ethical lines. Mr. Musk, he says, should not have access to the private information of everyday citizens without their consent.
The image of Mr. Musk holding court in the Oval Office this week, standing with his young son while Mr. Trump looked up from his desk, felt particularly off-putting to Mr. Abdallah.
Mr. Musk, he said, “seemed like he was almost a guy directly in control of the White House.”
Mr. Abdallah, who voted for a third-party candidate in the 2024 election, voiced strong opposition to Mr. Trump’s recent proposals to take over the Gaza war zone, move the Palestinians there to other countries and keep them from returning.
Those are ridiculous ideas, “on every level,” Mr. Abdallah said.
Mr. Abdallah said that whenever he had heard Mr. Trump talk up the newly revealed Gaza plan, he had the same stunned reaction: “I think I must be drinking or smoking something to be listening to this.”
“Honestly,” he said, “I can’t comprehend it.”
When asked what advice he would give to Mr. Trump, Mr. Abdallah said, “Treat the Palestinians like humans and give them equality and give them their land back. Or, at the very minimum, a two-state solution. That’s my number one priority, even forget the fact that I’m Arab American, just in terms of a human being.”
‘With Trump, it seems to be like, boom, boom, boom.’
Jaime Escobar Jr., 46, from Roma, Texas
Jaime Escobar Jr., the mayor of a small town on the Texas border, is dazzled by the speed of the president’s administrative moves.
“The wheels of government, I’ve always been told, run very slowly,” he said. “But with Trump, it seems to be like, boom, boom, boom.”
It sharply contrasts what he experienced as mayor of Roma, population 11,000, as it struggled with the migrant crisis under the Biden administration. That experience alone prompted Mr. Escobar, a lifelong Democrat, to switch parties. In 2024, he voted for Mr. Trump. The surrounding Starr County, a formerly Democratic area, also flipped for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Escobar is upbeat about most of what he is seeing from the White House, including Mr. Musk’s barn-burning approach to cutting the federal work force.
“I think he’s one of our smartest people in our planet,” Mr. Escobar said. “I’m kind of excited to see if he can really help cut the wasteful spending.”
For all his enthusiasm, Mr. Escobar, 46, does have a few requests. “I do believe in checks and balances,” he explained. If Mr. Musk “has an opportunity to maybe present himself in front of Congress and answer questions, I think that would be great for the American people.”
Tariffs may be Mr. Escobar’s greatest worry. Mr. Trump has announced stiff tariffs on imported aluminum and steel, and others may be in the offing.
“Is that going to happen?” he asked. “Mexico is our biggest trading partner, and we definitely want to have a good relationship with our neighbors.”
‘Right now, everything feels so up in the air.’
Isaiah Thompson, 22, from Washington, D.C.
Isaiah Thompson is not sure what to make of Mr. Trump’s uncharted mission to downsize and remake the federal government.
To Mr. Thompson, a college student, the decisions to impose tariffs or dismantle the Department of Education or fire federal workers has felt like overreach, coming too fast and without enough explanation or justification.
But none of those actions are as frightening to Mr. Thompson as the president handing Mr. Musk a powerful, unorthodox agency job. The billionaire is charged with rooting out wasteful federal spending as the leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency. While Mr. Thompson appreciates Mr. Musk’s prowess as a businessman, he can’t understand how a private citizen could be given so much access to the federal government and internal data without clear boundaries.
“It’s very in character that Donald Trump would bring Elon Musk on board with him,” said Mr. Thompson, 22, who is studying chemical engineering at Howard University. “Who wouldn’t want to be allied with the richest man in the world? So I think that’s smart.”
But, he said, there are “no checks and balances.”
“An unelected position means that the people of this country, the Democratic principals that this country was founded on, was not included in putting this man in that position,” said Mr. Thompson, who supports the Green Party but believed it was more practical to vote for Kamala Harris.
Mr. Thompson is holding out hope that Mr. Trump’s grand plan will somehow start to make sense to him. “Right now, everything feels so up in the air.”
‘When someone’s trying to cut spending, which is going to help me in the long run, I take him at face value.’
Perry Hunter, 55, from Sellersburg, Ind.
Despite the controversy over Mr. Musk’s role in the new administration, Perry Hunter, a teacher, is all for it. Why not, he asked, have the world’s richest man use his business prowess to tackle the United States’ $36 trillion debt, a huge problem that so many past administrations could not handle? Rising debt, he worries, will spur inflation and make everyday items even more costly. “We’ve got to tighten our belts for the next few years to get this under control,” he said.
“Maybe I’m putting my trust in the wrong person,” Mr. Hunter said. “But when someone’s trying to cut spending, which is going to help me in the long run, I take him at face value. Everyone seemed to trust him and like him before he supported Donald Trump.”
Mr. Hunter remains in awe of the speed of Mr. Trump’s changes, though he is wondering how many of them will last. “A lot of the things that he’s doing, they’re questionable constitutionally,” he said. Mr. Hunter is watching how the courts rule on various issues, including on Mr. Trump’s effort to bar transgender girls and women from women’s sports.
Mr. Hunter, the father of two athletes, is in favor of a ban, and said it would have been unfair if his daughter, who played volleyball in high school and college, had competed against a transgender player.
“I don’t see how you can support biological women not having their own sports, their own locker rooms, their own bathrooms,” he said.
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