In this episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy is joined by the columnists Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada to dissect the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term and prepare for what’s to come.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: This is the First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
On Tuesday we hit the milestone: President Trump has been in office 100 days. So what have we learned? He has used power chaotically — but for a purpose: to throw an entire country off balance, to gain maximum leverage while keeping friends and enemies alike on their back heel. He’s ruled by executive order to an unprecedented degree, and he’s trying to remake America in his image.
He decides who matters and who is disposable. So tens of thousands of federal workers are gone. D.E.I. is gone. Transgender people are erased as a matter of government policy. Undocumented migrants are being rounded up, and deportations are also underway of people lawfully in the country, and even American citizens. The president is doing much of this in defiance of the courts and the Constitution.
So how do we make sense of the last 100 days, and what should we prepare for as we look ahead? I wanted to talk about all of this with my colleagues Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada, two Times columnists in Washington who’ve watched President Trump closely.
Thank you both for being here.
Maureen Dowd: Thank you, Patrick.
Carlos Lozada: Good to be here, Patrick.
Healy: So thinking back on the last few months, I want to ask both of you first — how would you describe Trump’s approach to power in a word or a phrase?
Dowd: Graspy.
Healy: Tell me more.
Dowd: Well, he’s more imperialistic. I mean, all this craziness about wanting to annex Canada and Greenland and Panama, the Kennedy Center, D.C., Ivy League school departments, law firms. But he’s graspy in the sense that we’ve never seen a president doing business like he’s doing with the meme coin and his crypto company, where the conflict of interest becomes a confluence of interest.
Healy: Is there anything he doesn’t want, Maureen? I mean, of all these things, is there anything he hasn’t ——
Dowd: No. I mean, he wants all the gold in the world. He actually has a cabinetmaker in Florida who’s called the gold guy, who has come up to put all of that crazy gold in the Oval Office and ruin it.
Healy: Carlos, what about you? What word or phrase comes to mind for you?
Lozada: When I think about Trump in power, it’s not just that he takes power or seizes power or uses power. He also just assumes power. The administration’s working assumption seems to be: Just do it. It’s like the Nike presidency. His justification is that the election gave him a broad mandate, but even more than as president, he embodies the popular will.
They use that vision of the popular will to justify a lot of these power grabs. When Stephen Miller, his aide, talks about 80-20 issues, that’s what he’s talking about. Sort of like, well, this is the popular will, so who cares about the details? It’s like the old line about how it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Trump doesn’t ask for either one because either one is a sign of weakness.
Healy: Carlos, you just nailed something that came up repeatedly in a focus group we just did of first-time Trump voters, people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and then voted for Trump last November, and it was that “Just do it” element that you identified. These people, even if they are now uncomfortable with Trump — some of them even regretting their choice — they do feel really moved by the idea that, as one of them said, “God, a president can do something. He can do something.” Is the action the point there, Carlos?
Lozada: Well, there’s barely a hop, skip and a jump from “Just do it” to “I alone can do it” or “I alone can fix it.” In a sense, it’s a very populist approach, but populism is also antipluralist. It’s a vision of power that doesn’t admit other players or conventional limits on the one leader. So that’s why the notion of the president just going ahead and doing stuff — that’s part of why I think he loves to sign executive orders. That’s very presidential. He loves to sign documents and that, to most people who aren’t imbibing politics every moment of their lives, that looks presidential. That is a president doing stuff — that is, signing things to get stuff done.
Healy: Let’s go back to January. Maureen, how did you think President Trump’s first 100 days would go and then how did it go by comparison to what you might’ve been thinking?
Dowd: Well, The Times is very strict about letting us use the word “irony,” because it’s so often misused. But I think the irony of Trump’s first 100 days is that he’s always presented himself as this brand expert. He slapped his name on half of New York, but he has taken the greatest brand in the history of the world, which is the United States, and destroyed it in 100 days. And he’s well on his way to destroying the brand of our dollar. So I don’t think anyone expected that.
Healy: Did you think the destruction would go quite like this? Because for me, I really thought retribution was going to be the thing, that he’d be going after his enemies and he’d be so consumed by his targets that it would really throw him off track. But instead it does feel like, whether it’s Stephen Miller or Susie Wiles, they’ve kind of kept him on those executive orders that Carlos was talking about. Every day, it’s kind of a new target. But did you see the destruction ——
Dowd: We always have to go back to the idea that people had an image of him as a successful executive because of “The Apprentice.” But actually, he had six bankruptcies and he wasn’t a good executive. His father’s lawyer had to bring a bag of coins or chips to the Atlantic City casino to rescue him once. And so he’s turned the United States government — they’re calling it dealism — into a government of dealism, but he’s undermined what America’s known for, which is our idealism. He’s just sort of mucked up all our values.
Lozada: I hadn’t heard dealism, which I actually like better than the term people are using: “transactionalism.” I mean, when I look back on the first 100 days, Trump has this ability to shock you yet not surprise you at the same time. It was clear that they were going to be much better prepared than they were in 2017 to come out of the gate with an array of policies. The executive orders even felt weirdly better written than they were last time around; they were like actual policy documents.
And so, you sort of knew that he was going to come out on tariffs, on immigration. But the extremes to which he’s gone is what can be a little shocking, if not entirely surprising. Just the immigration policies, the deportation policies, the masked-federal-agents-in-unmarked-cars kind of thing — that’s not something I necessarily anticipated.
Dowd: Trump’s greatest wizardry is creating this dark plane of unreality, and that’s how he got to be president again, where people believe what he’s saying, even if it runs counter to fact. But there have been some new things this week where he is having less success with. For example, where he kept saying that they’ve been talking to China, and clearly they haven’t. So Trump is getting caught in a lie. And they asked Scott Bessent about it and then he got impatient and said: I’m not running the switchboard at the White House. And he can’t lie, but he can’t back up Trump. And as David Axelrod says, this is reality, it’s not a reality show as Trump likes to treat it.
Healy: Carlos, a couple of times during the first 100 days, you and I talked about how to help readers understand, what’s most consequential? And I’m curious, looking back at the first 100 days, what do you see as the most important thing Trump did? Whether there’s a specific policy or executive order — or, as you wrote about recently, how Trump changed the way we think of the phrase “We, the people.” What has mattered most?
Lozada: That’s so hard — there’s such a fire hose of news every day. I think about, every day, looking at the New York Times app or other news apps, and I look at what’s at the top and I think: Is that the most important thing going on, or is that just the latest thing going on? And I don’t know. That’s a difficult thing. The sense of hierarchy is sort of eluding me sometimes. It takes time to figure out what is really the most important thing.
I think that one thing I’ve been thinking about is the notion, as you just put it, of “We, the people” — that’s how the Constitution begins. And what I’ve been thinking about with Trump is that so much of what he’s doing is limiting the universe of “We, the people.” He’s telling us that there are people who really don’t count in that world. And that could be federal workers — they’re expendable, their loyalties are suspect, we don’t need them. The U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants also don’t belong, aren’t really “We, the people,” should not receive citizenship at birth as the 14th Amendment tells us. Opponents of the president, former officials who have criticized him don’t deserve to be protected.
You know, it’s another one of the key aspects of populism that populist leaders purport to speak for the people, but the definition of the people is always malleable. It always changes, it’s always shifting. And inevitably it becomes smaller, it shrinks until the only people who are “We, the people” are the supporters of the leader. And to me that’s one of the through lines of the Trump era, certainly of the first 100 days of this second term.
Healy: Maureen, what has Trump done that matters most?
Dowd: Well, again, I come back to the fake reality he’s trying to create. He pardoned the 1,600 Jan. 6 insurrectionists and is trying to change the narrative of that day, which shall go down in infamy. He’s going after The Associated Press because they won’t use “Gulf of America.” So it’s like, if he says it and you don’t go along with it because it’s not true, then he punishes you the way he’s doing with Zelensky.
I interviewed George Clooney about his Broadway show, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” about Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy, and when I first heard he was bringing this to Broadway, I was kind of surprised, like, what is the relevance? It’s become more relevant every minute of every day, because of how Trump is going after people who are truthful but who won’t go along with his fake reality.
Healy: Maureen, you’re getting at something that I hear about so much from listeners and readers of The Times, which is that tension, that total frustration that they feel about this fake reality that they see Trump peddling and the way that it is degrading and destroying the truth — the truth about America. And they ask: Why isn’t the fight against him much greater? Where is the mobilization? Where’s the call to action against Trump?
I want to ask: You’ve both worked in Washington for decades; you know the way the bureaucracy resisted and even thwarted Trump at times in his first term, and the way Congress and the courts have slowed down or even stopped presidents before. So I have to ask: Has the fight gone out of Washington? Has the deep state and the Democrats and the courts lost their moxie or their creativity to resist? Because I keep hearing people telling me what a gloomy, depressed place D.C. is now, as if DOGE and Trump have just laid siege in 100 days and the fight has just been leached out of the town. What happened?
Dowd: Well, I’m a Washington native and I can sort of understand why everyone is reeling, because nothing like this has ever happened in Washington. Washington was a very stable place, no matter whether it was Republican or Democrat. And then to have this wolf pack of DOGE kids coming in and either muscling their way into agencies or sneaking into agencies and getting hold of sensitive taxpayers’ information was something we couldn’t have conceived of happening. A president letting that happen with no rules about disclosure or what would be private. The Civil Service is gutted now, and all the programs around the world that gave America its reputation for generosity and idealism, and it was done very quickly, and it’s very hard for people to understand how to fight that.
Lozada: I see something similar. I’ve been in Washington not lifelong, but I’ve been here for about 25 years now, and people are sad, and people assume a certain sadness or concern or worry in others like you. The most common way is when someone approaches you with a kind of head tilt and ask: How are you doing? How are you holding up? People are losing their jobs. It’s a topic of conversation at Little League Baseball games, in neighborhood book clubs, among the dog walkers in the neighborhood. And that’s novel.
There was this sense that Washington would endure. Administrations come and go, but civil servants, public servants keep doing their work. And part of that is DOGE. Part of that is also the abdication of Congress’s own powers of oversight. It’s not just that Trump is doing these things that are affecting the livelihoods and the life work and missions of civil servants, of D.O.J. lawyers and of N.I.H. scientists, but it’s also the sense that it seems like nothing can stop it. It seems like no one is doing anything about it. The normal checks and balances aren’t operating.
And so it’s not just: Oh, I’m losing my job. It’s: No one is really stopping this thing that is moving forward relentlessly and somewhat chaotically.
Healy: Carlos, are Republicans in D.C. sad, too? And I ask that because I know some are quite triumphal, but others who I’ve talked to don’t like the instability, and they don’t like the sense that there isn’t a clear plan or logic to some of what is happening. So I want to include that wing of America, too. Are Republicans sad?
Lozada: Well, I guess I would ask you what sort of Republican you’re thinking about?
If you’re thinking about the Wall Street Chamber of Commerce, free trader, pro-immigration, robust internationalism, George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney type of Republican, then these first 100 days have not been good for that kind of Republican. But I don’t know if that’s really the party that exists anymore today. And I don’t think that party is coming back. The Republican Party we have instead is a lot of things. There’s the kind of populist, anti-immigrant wing of the party. They’ve had big victories. There’s the pro-Trump, Silicon Valley wing of the party. They’ve had some wins, and some losses as well, as Maureen is pointing out.
But those parts don’t really like each other. Trump is a mix of all of those things. And so I wouldn’t say that the sadness in Washington or the constant expression of concern is solely the province of the left or of liberals. But it really depends on what kind of Republican you’re thinking of.
Healy: I want to talk about how all of this is landing with voters. We’ve definitely seen some recent polls suggesting that more voters are souring on President Trump, particularly on the economy and even on immigration. How do you both think Americans are reflecting on his first 100 days?
Dowd: I asked my siblings, who are two-time Trump voters, how they feel now that their 401(k)s are dropping, as Dave Barry would say, faster than a pig out of a helicopter. And they are not as alarmed as I would think. They’re waiting and thinking that Trump has a plan.
But when people begin to realize that their Veterans Affairs office has been closed, or when DOGE is messing with Social Security and Medicare, when it filters down to them, which it’s going to do really fast — it’s cliché to say he’s like the Wizard of Oz, but the curtain is opening. Toto is opening the curtain and you’re just seeing that this is a con man with a lame con.
Lozada: What was that John McCain line that he would say? It’s always darkest just before it goes completely pitch black. Right? I may be misquoting the late John McCain, but ——
Dowd: No, he did. That’s great.
Lozada: In some ways, I think about these polls and it’s not a huge stretch to say it’s kind of par for the course for Trump. His approval ratings are never great, even if his approval among his base remains high. It’s often been like that.
What is interesting is that his approval rating on the core issues that helped him win the election are becoming weaknesses. Not among his hardest-core supporters, but maybe among the voters who weren’t totally crazy about him, who maybe voted for Biden in 2020 but now went back to Trump because of inflation and the border.
But now those don’t seem like winning issues for him. I guess it’s one thing to say you want a disruptor, that you want a wrecking ball in Washington. It’s another to experience the disruption to your retirement account, or to see the wrecking ball against basic civil liberties. Then you might not be so crazy about it. I wonder if that’s what’s being reflected in the polls.
Healy: Maureen, in your most recent column, you captured some of the ways that Trump has become what you called “the Emperor of Chaos.” And I think both of those words are so key: “emperor” and “chaos.”
You would think that an emperor or a strongman would be able to prevent chaos. That they would have control. Why has President Trump lost a handle on so many things? Or was it an illusion that he ever had a handle on things in the first place?
Dowd: Yeah. We talked about that with “The Apprentice.” I think that gave the illusion.
I remember Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, saying to me the first time Trump got elected that it’s going to be a federal day care because he’s the high-chair king. He’s a child in many ways who wants to throw the applesauce at the wall. He enjoys that. He enjoys the chaos.
But I think he’s gotten himself into a fix this time because he’s — what’s the line from “Network”? He’s messed with primal forces. He’s upended the American economy, the global economy, American values in one fell swoop. He just turned everything that’s important to us upside down. And I think it’s going to be very hard to put it all back together again.
Healy: Yeah. Presidents can only control so much, but boy, they can make a mess of a lot.
Dowd: Well, that’s his whole plan. Take away control from the other branches of government and be an authoritarian.
Healy: So now that we’ve experienced 100 days of the second Trump administration and we’ve got 1,300 more to go, what are you two most worried about? About what he’s doing inside the United States, but also the country’s place in the world? In other words, what will be the hardest to undo by people who disagree with what the president is doing?
Lozada: I think you hit on it right there when you said, “What will be the hardest to undo?” Those are the things that I am thinking about the most. Executive orders, like we said, they feel so presidential, but executive orders can be reversed.
They can do a lot of damage while they’re still in effect, but they can be undone by future presidents. In fact, a lot of the Trump executive orders are actually undoing Biden executive orders, which in turn were undoing Trump orders from the first term. It’s kind of like time traveling, Whac-a-Mole or something. But there are things that are hard to reverse: the rapid decline of American leadership, say, just in scientific research, in funding biomedical research in the world — that is going to have long-lasting consequences, not just for science and for technology, but for American leadership in those fields.
I worry about how leaders in Russia and China are going to feel emboldened due to the way Trump looks at the war in Ukraine, the signals that China might pick up because of that. But I mainly worry about the erosion of the American ideas and ideals that Maureen touched on and that have drawn so many people here, including me and my own family, to come to the United States.
It’s good if your country is the place where people want to come to make their dreams come true. That shouldn’t be a bad thing. But now we’ve decided that it is — we don’t want to be that place anymore. And you can’t un-ring that bell with a new president, that trust. You can’t un-ring that bell with a midterm election.
Dowd: Yeah, I think one of the most shocking things about Trump is just this casual cruelty that America was never known for. I mean, my father came here from Ireland when he was a teenager. Now his daughter is a columnist at The New York Times.
America stood for dreams and idealism, and now Trump goes to the pope’s funeral and he’s blowing off Europe, all of our friends and allies, and they’re scrambling around trying to figure out what they’re going to do without America as the leader of the world. The Canadian election where someone who opposed Trump is now the leader of Canada, it’s just — even in this brief time, it has realigned the entire world and not in a way that’s positive for us.
Healy: I want to end where we started this show, which was about Trump’s desire to change America. I want to ask each of you: What still gives you hope for America? I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna about this, but this is one person, this is one president. This is one 100 days. And while a midterm election does feel inadequate to the task of what is going on, as Carlos was getting at, I do want to ask you: What gives you hope about America?
Dowd: Dead silence, Patrick. Yikes.
Lozada: I guess maybe America itself, in a way, is what gives me hope. And here I’m just — what’s the word I’m looking for? I’m just kind of retroactively affirming my own decisions, but I became an American citizen in November of 2014. So 2016 was the first American election I ever voted in.
Especially living where I do, the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I often get the joke, like: Oh, you have any regrets for joining us just at this time? And the answer is never — not at all, not at all. And all the ideals and all the principles that we purport to hold dear here are what continues to give me hope.
Now, if we’ve learned anything in this time, it is that norms don’t norm themselves. You have to realize that institutions are only as strong and as resilient as the people defending them. The appeal that this place has held for so long for so many is what continues to give me hope, even if it means we have to work a lot harder at it than we thought we did before.
Dowd: Yeah, I would agree. I think America’s a very big, fantastic idea and Trump is a very small, petty man, and I think that’s going to become more obvious with each moment.
Healy: Maureen, Carlos, thanks so much for joining me.
Dowd: Thank you, Patrick.
Lozada: Thank you, Patrick.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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