In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump exerted his power in a sweep and scale that has no easy historical comparison.
His actions target the architecture of the New Deal and the Great Society, but they hardly stop there. He is also rewriting the Reagan Republican orthodoxy of free trade and strong international alliances. All of it is in service of fundamentally altering the role of government in American life and the U.S. place in the world.
To implement parts of his vision, he deployed the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, to dismantle the federal workforce, deciding only after the fact if the cuts had gone too far.
Trump also has unilaterally declared the power to remake the post-World War II alliance with Europe that has largely maintained peace for nearly 80 years. The Republican president has made extraordinary emergency declarations to rewrite the rules of global trade, setting off panic in markets and capitals around the world. And he has ordered the removal of migrants to a prison in El Salvador without judicial review.
What’s more, he has taken direct aim at law, media, public health and culture, attempting to bring all to heel, with some surprising success.
Many of his actions were promised during his campaign but he put them in place with a blunt force aggressiveness.
Here is a look at the most consequential first 100 days of an American presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Economy
Trump has tried to bend the U.S. economy to his will. But one force is unbowed: the financial markets.
Trump says the outcome of his tariffs will eventually be “beautiful.” So far, it’s been an difficult three months with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. It has become a time of anxiety instead of his promised golden age of prosperity.
Trump has managed to reshape the economy through executive power, largely bypassing the Republican-controlled Congress. He has imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, including on America’s two largest trading partners, Mexico and Canada. Chinese goods are getting taxed at a combined 145%.
The trade penalties increased tensions with the European Union and sent Japan and South Korea rushing to negotiate. Despite clear evidence of American economic supremacy, Trump claimed that the U.S. has been ripped off by trade.
The president says his tariffs will create domestic factory jobs, cover the cost of an income tax cut plan that could exceed $5 trillion over 10 years, repay the $36 trillion national debt and also serve as leverage to renegotiate trade on terms favoring the United States. But his tariffs could reduce an average household’s disposable income by $4,900, according to The Budget Lab at Yale University.
Trump has used his office to promote investment announcements that have yet to make much of an economic impact. Trump talked up a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. He invited Hyundai executives to the White House for the announcement of a new steel mill in Louisiana. But factory construction slipped in February and outside forecasters have increased the likelihood of a recession this year
He has rewarded the coal and oil sectors by attacking alternative energy, yet his tariffs pushed up the price of the steel and other materials that the energy industry needs to build out production.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said Trump will take full ownership of the economy in the final three months of this year, when the administration policies are fully in place.
— By Josh Boak
DOGE
Trump promised to take on what he called waste, fraud and abuse in government. He tapped Musk to lead the effort.
Musk turned his plan for a Department of Government Efficiency into one of the most polarizing and consequential pieces of Trump’s first 100 days.
The billionaire entrepreneur approached the task with a tech mogul ethos: break things, then see what you want to fix. Firings were widespread and indiscriminate. Programs were eliminated with limited analysis. The human consequences were left for others to sort out.
Musk’s team accessed sensitive databases and burrowed into little-known departments responsible for managing the government workforce and federal properties.
Republicans have long dreamed about scaling back the bureaucracy. But even veterans of Washington’s budget battles were stunned by the speed and ferocity of Musk’s work.
DOGE also made mistakes. Claims of massive savings did not add up. Musk wildly inflated estimates of how much taxpayer money is lost to fraud. His broadsides against Social Security, which he described as a “Ponzi scheme,” rattled retirees.
It is unlikely that Musk will accomplish his grand-scale goals. His plans for slashing $1 trillion out of the budget were pared back to $150 billion.
Trump and Musk lavish praise on each other. But Musk’s time in the administration is limited and Trump has begun talking about Musk’s work in the past tense.
“This guy did a fantastic job,” Trump said during a recent Cabinet meeting.
— By Chris Megerian
Immigration
Cracking down on illegal immigration was the anthem of Trump’s campaign, and it is the issue where he has the greatest support.
He has followed through by implementing some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, even as the promised mass deportations have yet to materialize.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants with limited due process, then used it to send hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order.
His administration has balked at the Supreme Court’s order, issued with no noted dissents, that it must work to return Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
Trump sent troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and temporarily deported migrants using military flights. He declared gangs foreign terrorist organizations and barred migrants arriving at the southern border from seeking asylum in the United States. Officials converted a Biden-era app known as CBP One, which about 900,000 people had used to schedule appointments to legally enter the U.S., into a mechanism for urging migrants to self-deport.
The administration pledged to end birthright citizenship for people who were born in the U.S., while proposing “gold cards” that would allow foreigners to buy American citizenship for $5 million.
Officials have sought to expel migrants from many countries who had been given temporary legal status, and they canceled the Social Security numbers that some had been legally issued by moving them to lists of dead people.
Before El Salvador, the Trump administration sent migrants to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, while also requiring Canadians to register when crossing into the U.S. Officials pressured the IRS to surrender sensitive data for hundreds of thousands of people who are in the U.S. illegally, which could make it easier to find them.
Illegal border crossings dropped precipitously. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said 7,181 people were apprehended nationwide between border crossings — a 14% decrease from February and a 95% drop from March 2024.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 46% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while about half say he has “gone too far” when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
The administration is nonetheless considering evoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows the president to deploy the military on U.S. soil, including to help detain migrants. —By Will Weissert
Retribution
Trump entered office pledging to bring “retribution” for his supporters.
He made good on that on his first day and virtually every week since, with actions taking aim at the prosecutors who investigated him and the law firms that employed them. He went after former officials who criticized him or asserted, correctly, that he had lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump ordered the suspension of the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed onto a letter during the 2020 campaign stating that the saga of Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence campaign.
Trump’s Justice Department fired the prosecutors who investigated him as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s team and demanded the names of FBI agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Executive orders targeted some of the country’s elite law firms, in some cases because they employ or once employed prosecutors who investigated Trump. Those orders have sought to punish the firms by stripping the security clearances of their attorneys, barring them from federal buildings and terminating federal contracts.
Some firms have successfully sued to halt enforcement of key provisions of the orders, but even more have cut deals with the White House, agreeing to provide a combined hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to causes championed by Trump.
The nation’s top universities have not been spared, either.
The administration pulled $400 million in research grants and other funding for Columbia University over the school’s handling of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; Columbia agreed to changes demanded by the Trump team.
Some $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania was suspended over a transgender swimmer who last competed for the school in 2022.
Harvard, which has $9 billion in government funding at stake, refused to comply with Trump’s demands. The administration responded by freezing grants and opening an inquiry about the university’s tax exempt status.
The president has singled out individuals, too. Presidential memos call for scrutiny of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official from the first Trump administration who has become a rump critic, and Chris Krebs, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who angered Trump after he declared the 2020 election to be secure and the ballot counts to be accurate.
On Thursday, Trump extended his reach to ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform. He instructed the Justice Department to conduct an investigation. — By Eric Tucker
Courts, judges and the rule of law
Trump has consistently said he would follow an order from federal judges. But that has not stopped talk of a possible constitutional crisis over defying the courts.
His executive orders reshaping the federal government are facing more than 150 lawsuits on issues from fired federal workers and immigration to transgender rights.
Judges have ruled against the administration dozens of times, blocking parts of his agenda for now. The administration has argued that individual judges should not be able to issue nationwide injunctions.
Trump issued an extraordinary call for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him the case of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members. That prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who did not mention the president by name but said impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreements over court decisions.
The administration has also pushed back in court, quickly appealing multiple orders to the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
Trump so far has a mixed record at the Supreme Court in a flurry of emergency appeals. The justices have handed down some largely procedural rulings siding with the administration. They also have rejected Trump’s broad arguments in several cases, including the one involving the Venezuelans and another in the Abrego Garcia case.
— By Lindsay Whitehurst
Diplomacy and international relations
Trump has rejected the post-World War II order that has formed the basis for global stability and security.
He has rejected long-standing alliances and hinted at scaling back the U.S. troop presence in Europe. Longtime allies such as Germany and France have suggested they no longer can depend on Washington.
Trump also pledged a swift end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, so far to little effect.
He set a new standard for hosting a leader of another country when he openly chided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump has repeatedly, and inaccurately, said Ukraine started the war; it began when Russia invaded in February 2022.
His actions have led allies in Europe, along with Canada, Japan and South Korea, to question their reliance on the U.S. and whether commitments that have long endured apply no more.
Trump has directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make dramatic cuts of people and programs at the State Department. Rubio has complied and said some in the department have followed a “radical” ideology.
The president has upended other multilateral organizations. He immediately withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, canceling participation in the Paris Climate accord on global warming and took action against the International Criminal Court.
He has effectively shuttered the United States Agency for International Development, long seen as an example of an effective tool to provide humanitarian aid and to build goodwill, even though some programs were beset by corruption.
At the same time, he has repeatedly called for the U.S. to annex Greenland, which is a Danish territory, to retake control of the Panama Canal and to make Canada the 51st U.S. state.
— By Matthew Lee
Congress
Congress is proving to be almost no match for this White House.
Trump is testing, challenging and even bullying the Congress in unparalleled ways -– legal migrants, investigating perceived enemies and churning the economy — and all but daring lawmakers to object.
With unified Republican control of the White House and Congress, the GOP has a rare opportunity to muscle through an ambitious partisan agenda.
But Trump has shown he does not necessarily want or need Congress to accomplish his goals.
The president has issued almost 10 times as many executive orders as the slashing programs, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress, which holds the power under the Constitution to allocate money to the agencies.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the second in the line of presidential succession, portrays himself as the “quarterback” for the “coach” – Trump — who is calling the plays. In the Senate, Republican senators confirmed some of his more contentious nominees over nominal objections.
Democrats are warning of the creep of authoritarianism into American. democracy. “Our Founding Fathers were very aware that a strong executive could essentially crowd out democracy and become an autocrat,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
Behind the scenes, many Republicans are trying to push back, for local imperatives such as agriculture and trade, but so far, most are acquiescing to the president.
— By Lisa Mascaro
Military
For the past three months the Pentagon has been rocked by the removals of top military leadership, including its only female four-star officers, its Joint Chiefs chairman — a Black general — and its top military lawyers.
The defense chief, Pete Hegseth, has been floundering in controversy.
He was a key participant in the Signal chat set up by national security adviser Mike Waltz, sending details of sensitive military operations over the nonsecure channel. Hegseth also used a second Signal chat to send similar information to a group that included his wife and brother. That was followed by the purge of his top staff: He removed or shifted at least five of them, including three whom he said were under investigation for leaks.
Trump has said the military had gone “woke” and he acted swiftly to reverse long-standing policies.
He issued an executive order to remove transgender service members, which has been stalled by the courts. Hegseth ordered the military to eliminate any programming, books or imagery that celebrates diversity.
More change is coming.
Hegseth, long an opponent of women in front-line combat jobs, has ordered a broad review of military standards to ensure they are the same for women and men. Tens of thousands of career defense civilians are set to either voluntarily depart the agency or be pushed out through a reduction in force.
The internal changes come as the military is reshaping for a potential future China fight, and just as it is potentially about to receive an infusion of funds as Trump weighs an almost $1 trillion budget for the department.
Social media posts that celebrated military women or cultural diversity are gone. Instead the services are publicly promoting increases in enlistments, even though the latest totals reflect new recruiting programs and improvements that began long before Trump was elected.
The military has dedicated significant resources to Trump’s broader order to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. He has transferred control of a thin strip of land along the border to the Defense Department so troops can arrest migrants for trespassing on military land.
—By Tara Copp and Lolita C. Baldor
Public health
At the Department of Health and Human Services, 10,000 jobs are gone. Billions of dollars in research sent to scientists and universities was shut off. Public meetings to discuss flu shots and other vaccines have been canceled.
Fluoride in drinking water may be the next to go, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has done a blitz of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign at day cares, schools and health centers around the country where he has promised to work with Trump’s other agency leaders to prohibit soda from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, limit dyes in the food supply and call for fluoride to be removed from drinking water.
Kennedy’s resistance to launching a vaccination campaign as a growing measles outbreak has worsened, so far infecting hundreds and leaving two young children dead, has elicited concerns from doctors, public health experts and lawmakers.
Those worries deepened after he eliminated thousands of jobs across the nation’s public health agencies, including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. The move, department officials projected, will save taxpayers $1.8 billion.
But some have escaped steep cuts. Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced an unusually steep rate increase for private health insurers that provide plans for older Americans through Medicare Advantage.
It will cost an extra $25 billion.
— By Amanda Seitz
Energy and environment
Trump has reversed Biden’s focus on slowing climate change to pursue what the Republican calls U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market.
He created a National Energy Dominance Council, led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and directed it to move quickly to drive up already record-high U.S. energy production, particularly fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, and remove regulatory barriers that may slow that down.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, but he has moved even more aggressively in his second term to roll back major environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, motor vehicles and manufacturers.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has announced a series of actions to roll back landmark regulations, including a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change. Zeldin’s plan would rewrite the EPA’s 2009 finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the legal underpinning for a host of climate regulations.
Zeldin says the changes, including more than 30 announced on a single day last month, will drive a dagger through the heart of what he calls “climate-change religion.”
Environmentalists and climate scientists call the so-called endangerment finding a bedrock of U.S. law and that any attempt to undo it has little chance to succeed.
While Trump’s administration has blocked renewable energy sources such as offshore wind, he has tried to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal, granting nearly 70 coal-fired power plants a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene.
Environmental groups and public health advocates say the plan could allow hundreds of companies to evade laws meant to protect the environment and public health.
— By Matthew Daly
Arts and culture
Dana Gioia, a poet and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, liked to say that a key to maintaining support for the NEA and other federal organizations was ensuring they backed projects in as many congressional districts as possible.
It was a bipartisan formula that lasted for some 60 years, through Democratic and Republican administrations, until Trump’s second term.
Since returning to office, Trump has ousted leaders, placed staff on administrative leave and cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that artists, libraries, museums, theaters and others in the cultural community had long counted on. Acting without congressional authorization, he has declared that institutions ranging from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the National Endowment for the Humanities have become fronts for a “woke” agenda that threatens to undermine what he calls “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
The organizations he has attacked mostly date from the mid-1960s, at the peak of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” domestic programs, when public support for government was high and the elevation of the arts a national priority. The Kennedy Center, the NEA, the NEH and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences all were established with broad backing from the two parties.
The humanities “are the languages, religions, laws, philosophies, and customs that make us distinct,” reads a statement on the NEH website. “They are our history and our cultures, the ideas and movements that have shaped societies throughout time.”
The NEH and others also cite practical benefits; arts and culture are good for economy.
The NEH homepage includes a headline stating that the endowment “supports the humanities in every state and U.S. jurisdiction.” The NEA’s website highlights a recent government study showing that the arts added $1.2 trillion to the economy in 2023 and, at a time when Trump has placed steep tariffs on countries worldwide, notes that “the total value of the nation’s arts exports was nearly $37 billion greater than the value of arts imports from other countries.”
—By Hillel Italie
Media
Many journalists figured a second Trump term would be a challenge for their industry. Few recognized how much.
The new administration has aggressively, even innovatively, waged combat against the press since taking office. It has fought against CBS News and The Associated Press in court, sought to dismantle the government-run Voice of America and sent the Federal Communications Commission after perceived media rivals.
The White House has established rapid-response social media feeds that maintain a constant flow of rejoinders to “hold the fake news accountable.”
“The Trump administration is on a campaign to do everything it can to diminish and obstruct journalism in the United States,” said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor.
The future of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and similar services that for generations have delivered unbiased news to countries where it is in short supply is being haggled over in court.
Trump sued CBS News because he believed “60 Minutes” edited a segment last fall to the advantage of election opponent Kamala Harris. It remains hanging over the network’s head, although the newsmagazine has produced several hard-hitting segments on the administration over the first 100 days, provoking Trump into an angry social media response on April 13.
Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, is investigating CBS News, too, along with ABC News, NBC News, NPR, PBS, Comcast and, most recently, the Walt Disney Co., the latter for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The AP sued the administration after it reduced the outlet’s access to presidential events for not following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, winning a court ruling that the government could not punish the organization for free speech. The administration says it intends to appeal. The administration has sought changes in the press corps that covers him, introducing new media that some suggest is often a euphemism for friendly outlets, and wants more control over who questions Trump.
Fox News is again the go-to source to hear Trump’s thinking, or that of people trying to influence him.
The young administration’s biggest embarrassment came when it unwittingly invited a journalist into a group chat where military plans were discussed. Even worse, it was a figure Trump reportedly dislikes: Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Trump press aides miss few opportunities to push the boss’ point of view, tweak the media or both simultaneously: They say they do not respond to questions from reporters who cite personal pronouns in their bios.
—-By David Bauder
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