The first 100 days of a presidency became a milestone under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who enlisted Congress to enact a blizzard of legislation that began the construction of a modern state to rescue the country from the Great Depression. Trump, in contrast, has used his frenetic first days in office to sideline Congress, issuing a barrage of executive orders to launch a great demolition, rolling back the New Deal, the Great Society, and the civil rights movement, opening the country to new excesses of private plunder. Roosevelt saved the democracy; whether Trump will destroy it remains to be seen.
 

Presidential Putsch

Where FDR used his radio addresses to reassure a distressed nation and provide hope, Trump employs his bully pulpit and social media to shock and appall. The endless lies and libels, the chaos and calumnies, the vulgarity and swagger, the menace and cruelty porn serve not just to enthrall the media and “own the liberals” but to flaunt his freedom from constraint.

On taking office, Trump immediately invoked the powers and prerogatives of the presidency that have accumulated over decades of wars and emergencies. He asserted a constitutional mandate for complete control of the executive branch. He declared several national emergencies—over the border, the immigrant “invasion,” energy supplies, criminal cartels, trade deficits, even the International Criminal Court. His MAGA zealots—and his deep-pocketed allies—terrorized Republican legislators into abject obeisance. “We are all afraid,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski admitted, “because retaliation is real.”

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Trump similarly moved to intimidate any bureaucratic resistance. The goal, as Russell Vought, his fanatical Office of Management and Budget director, explained in 2023, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

To achieve this, Trump unleashed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and his DOGE operatives as a landing force to open fire on government bureaucracy. That Musk’s operation will cost far more than it saves suggests that intimidation, not efficiency, was the message.

Trump not only appointed a gaggle of billionaires, cronies, and acolytes to cabinet positions but also reissued the executive order that exposes 50,000 high-level career positions to political removal, setting the stage for the purge described by Vice President JD Vance, who promised to dismiss “every single mid-level bureaucrat…and replace them with our people.”
 

Personal and Political Retribution

Characteristically, Trump quickly used his powers to exact personal and political revenge. “I am your retribution,” his promised his followers during the campaign. Pardons for the January 6 rioters, purges of those involved in investigating his crimes from the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the elimination of officials that challenged the big lie about the 2020 election followed.
 

The War on Woke

Trump immediately launched the right’s “war on woke.” The assault on migrants, DEI programs, critical race theory, and transgender persons—so central to the right’s electoral strategy—became administration fixations. Trump purposefully lawless deportation offensive featured public cruelty, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ICE Barbie photo ops—most notoriously, posing in front of migrants illegally shipped to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison—and videos of ICE arrests of students.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were blamed for everything from the Washington, DC, airline crash to the California fires. “If the Fed had spent less time on DEI, gender ideology, green energy, and fake climate change,” Trump charged, “inflation would never have been a problem.” Aided and abetted by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, the administration’s broader goal is to negate much of the progress of the civil rights revolution, from voting rights to affirmative action to equal protections for women and the LGBTQ community. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is turned on its head, pursuing purported discrimination against white men. Across the government, DEI programs have been eradicated, and those who worked on them targeted for dismissal. Corporations, fearful of retribution, rushed to scrub any DEI language from their annual reports. After nearly half of the civil rights division of the Department of Education was fired, the department announced that all-gender bathrooms would be a priority target. A Trump executive order launched a high-visibility crackdown on public schools and universities for allowing transgender women to perform on school teams. High-ranking African American and female generals were dismissed, scorned as DEI hires. Trump’s nominee as public affairs spokesmen for the Department of State openly asserted, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Action to prevent climate catastrophe—a “Marxist scam” in Trump’s lexicon—somehow became a central front of the war on woke. All mention of climate change has been scrubbed from government Web pages. Programs addressing extreme weather or investing in renewable energy or energy efficiency were cut. Trump even scrapped measuring extreme weather and reduced the government’s ability to warn people of what’s coming.
 

Disemboweling the New Deal

Central to the New Deal was the creation of independent regulatory agencies tasked with policing the marketplace, curbing financial fraud, limiting monopoly, and protecting workers, consumers, and the environment.

Central to Trump’s reaction is the gelding of those agencies, giving the White House control of regulation and enforcement. At issue is everything from airline safety to workplace safety to the safety of meat, vegetables, and the water we drink. Trump’s first move was to fire the cops on the beat—the inspector generals, the whistleblower protectors, and the ethics office head. An early Musk focus was on filleting the Internal Revenue Service now slated to lose 25 percent of its workforce, eviscerating the ability to limit tax evasion by corporations and the rich. Musk and Vought shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has recovered billions for victims of financial frauds. Finally, Trump issued an executive order giving the White House OMB—and Russell Vought—final review of actions of independent regulatory agencies, claiming the power to repeal rules without public comment or simply to stop enforcing them with no notice at all, free from judicial review.

At the same time, Trump teed up major cuts in domestic agencies. After Musk’s peremptory cuts of newly hired workers and offers of voluntary buyouts, federal agency heads are cobbling together plans to cut between 8 and 50 percent of their employees, according to an internal White House document obtained by The Washington Post.
 

The War on Workers

A major casualty has been working people, and particularly their right to organize. Trump has undercut virtually every agency tasked with protecting the rights of workers, decapitating the National Labor Relations Board by firing a board member illegally, closing mine safety offices in coal country, appointing an executive from Amazon—a company infamous for its mistreatment of workers—to head the Office of Safety and Health Administration that polices workplace safety.

Trump topped Ronald Reagan’s infamous dismissal of striking PATCO workers by stripping 50,000 TSA workers of their collective bargaining rights. Then he doubled down, invoking national security to issue an executive order depriving over 1 million federal employees in over 30 agencies of their union rights.
 

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Trump promised repeatedly in his campaigns to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the heart of America’s limited safety net. Yet Musk’s DOGE operatives parachuted into Social Security offices, illegally gaining access to computer systems, calling for shuttering regional offices, eliminating staff, rewriting computerized systems, while planning cuts of 7,000 employees and offering buyouts and early retirement to the entire staff of 57,000. The result has already led to crashes of the website, rising waiting times for phone inquiries, and what former agency heads warned was growing chaos.

Medicaid is targeted for deep cuts in the one piece of legislation that Trump needs from the legislature; his “one beautiful bill,” the reconciliation package that extends his tax cuts largely for the wealthy, increases the military budget, and cuts domestic programs with committees instructed to come up with cuts totaling as much as $880 billion from Medicaid and the children’s health program.
 

Trump Abroad: America First

Trump also immediately began tearing down the scaffolding of the global order constructed by the United States over the last decades. Allies have been scorned as freeloaders and our neighbors threatened with absorption (Canada, Greenland, Panama) or invasion (Mexico). He’s withdrawn from or defunded International Institutions—the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement on climate, and the UN Human Rights Council and Palestinian Relief Organization. Foreign assistance has been decimated. Everything from exchange programs to human rights and democracy support to scientific research and development has been slashed.

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, argues that Trump is headed down the “rabbit hole of isolationism,” but Trump’s America First is unilateralist, not isolationist. He’s called for a trillion-dollar annual military budget. The arms race with China and Russia is accelerating. The White House promises that no expense will be spared to build a “golden dome”—a retread of Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy. The State Department is shuttering embassies, but the 800 military bases remain. The Navy patrols the seven seas. Arms continue to supply Israel’s horror in Gaza. US bombing of Yemen has intensified. Tariffs have been added to sanctions as an economic weapon to damage and cajole.

The centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy has been his calamitous “Liberation Day” trade war with the world, imposing preposterous tariffs, then postponing a portion of them, still leaving them at historic levels.

As Representative Ryan Zinke, who served as secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term, concluded, “Tariffs are a tool the president enjoys because it’s personal power.” Corporate executives will plead for exemptions, like those Apple and tech companies immediately received. Heads of state will bargain for special deals. The president—and the president alone—will dispense the favors. Foreign policy analysts describe Trump’s foreign policy as “transactional.” As Trump meets privately with CEOs and heads of state, the “transactional” becomes more akin to a protection racket. The possibilities for bribes, inside information, and graft are infinite. Not surprisingly, the Trump organization launched Truth Social–branded investment accounts, promising investments in companies that benefit from Trump’s policies.
 

The Grift

Dismembering government capabilities and reducing regulatory constraints on business open the sluice gates to massive looting. As always, it begins at the top. The Trump family and businesses have consistently cashed in on their brand. Perhaps the largest new con is Trump’s cryptocurrency play. In the campaign, he announced plans to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” On the eve of assuming office, he brazenly created his own cryptocurrency—the $Trump meme coin—as well as several Trump-branded crypto ventures. Melania created her own crypto meme coin, $Melania, soon after. These enable those seeking favors to make direct but undisclosed payoffs to Trump. On taking office, Trump’s DOJ announced that it was closing the crypto task force, and the SEC dropped various crypto investigations. To flaunt his grift, as The Washington Post revealed, the Trump operation recently announced that the 220 top purchasers of $Trump coins would be treated to an “intimate private dinner” with Trump. Twenty-seven “crypto wallets” purchased stakes worth $1 million or more each, boosting the value of the coin by 30 percent temporarily. It is hard to imagine a more wanton violation of the laws against self-enrichment and bribery.

In April, Trump announced the beginnings of a “strategic reserve” of cryptocurrencies. This would elevate privately minted cryptocurrencies—heretofore used primarily for speculation and money laundering—to be part of the monetary reserves of the United States, suggesting that the Federal Reserve would step in to put a floor under their value. That sets the stage for the largest pump-and-dump plays in history.

More traditional forms of grift are also rampant, exemplified by Elon Musk’s dealings. Soon after the White House announced that Musk would police his own conflicts of interests, The New York Times reported that 11 regulatory agencies that suffered DOGE cuts in staff and budgets had more than 32 continuing investigations or enforcement actions against Musk’s six companies. In shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk eliminated the agency seeking to police payment systems like the one that Musk has planned for X, his social media platform. At the same time, Musk’s companies, particularly StarLink, are lining up for multibillion-dollar contracts from the FAA, GSA, FCC, NASA, Pentagon, and Commerce.
 

100 Days: Who Wins?

Trump will no doubt celebrate his 100 days as the greatest ever, “so many wins, you’ll get tired of winning.” Despite legions of lawsuits, brakes put down by independent courts, ominous warnings issued by the stock and bond markets, and an increasingly skeptical public, the flood-the-zone, move-fast-and-break-things strategy has proceeded. Trump has consolidated power in his White House. The bureaucracy has been savaged. The regulatory agencies defanged. The global scaffolding has been shredded.

But Trump is already less popular than any modern president at this early stage of his administration. The centerpiece of his domestic policy—the “one beautiful bill” that will offer up tax cuts largely for the wealthy paid for in part by spending cuts for the vulnerable—has yet to be exposed to public scrutiny. The outcome of his global tariff war remains to be seen.

Trump’s policies, however erratic on the surface, consistently favor the wealthy over the worker, the corporation over the consumer, the insider over the citizen. Perversely, Trump’s course will contribute to rather than confront the real security threats that Americans face—from climate change to corrosive inequality to unregulated AI to an accelerating nuclear arms race. If unchecked, Trump’s reign of chaos and corruption will leave Americans with lives likely to be increasingly nasty, brutish, and short.