There’s much to like in Trump’s start, but much more to dread.
There’s much to like in Trump’s start, but much more to dread.
T wo things cause me to rebel at the notion of handing out a report card on the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term. One is that the whole “first 100 days” is a monarchical formulation adopted by Franklin D. Roosevelt (our most monarchical president) in an echo of the famed “hundred days” of Napoleon’s return from exile in 1815 (never mind how that ended at Waterloo).
The other — which counseled against publishing this column until Day 101 — is that Trump’s first term taught us hard lessons in the dangers of grading Trump before he was done: He looked much better in January 2020 than in October 2020, and much better in October 2020 than in January 2021 — in spite of the fact that two of the greatest triumphs of his first term (the Amy Coney Barrett nomination and Operation Warp Speed) could not be graded before October and November of 2020.
Still, with appropriate cautions about the limits of personal power and the work-in-progress nature of some of Trump’s efforts so far, let me offer grades to Trump on a series of fronts.
Executive nominations: D. Personnel is policy, and it is always one of the first ways a new president sets a new tone. In the first Trump term, that was a mantra for more traditional conservatives and Republicans who were gratified not only that Trump hired a lot of solid, competent, conservative people, but that many of them lasted longer in their posts than did the Steve Bannons and Omarosas of the world. Not so this time. Of the three initial obviously disastrous choices (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Matt Gaetz), two got confirmed. Three other hires who fell into the “questionable, but the president deserves his team” bucket (Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem) have gotten off to rocky starts in various ways, with Hegseth in particular running a department that has devolved into a snake pit of leaks and rival factions, resulting in over a dozen firings already. Even the more responsible figures (such as Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Mike Waltz, and Kevin Hassett) have either stepped in messes of their own making (as in the case of Waltz’s Signal chat screwup) or been dragged down to defending things they clearly know to be indefensible. A few of the savvier nominees, such as Doug Burgum, have kept their heads down, but outside of the White House press office, it’s hard to find any part of the administration that is more competently staffed than it was the first time around. Trump could have done worse, but not by that much.
Then there’s the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While the choice of Elon Musk presents some major issues of conflicts of interest and legal challenges to his appointment without Senate confirmation, Musk at least has brought an inspired level of vigor and enthusiasm to his task. But even with a man of Musk’s ego and business accomplishments, a stronger president would have insisted on pairing him with an experienced Washington sherpa who could guide Musk through the bureaucratic traps and legal obstacles and make sure that his team of Silicon Valley neophytes to government work actually understood the records they were reviewing. There’s no shortage of grizzled small government conservatives hanging around D.C. who would gladly have led the torches into the swamp after decades of being thwarted at the task of cutting government. Instead, Trump paired Musk with Vivek Ramaswamy, another outsider who didn’t even last long enough to start his job. Musk’s best work may not last because he went in unguided, and that’s a shame.
Administration: B. DOGE and other Trump executive actions have been the most serious effort in memory to get the administrative state under democratic control and scale back its unaccountable powers. A few targets, such as USAID, will probably end up being significantly reformed. Harmeet Dhillon has managed addition by subtraction by triggering the mass resignations of people in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Trump and Musk deserve credit for that, but the chaotic nature of the project leaves serious questions not only about whether the things they’ve done will prove durable but also about whether they are firing the right people and cutting the right programs.
Legislative agenda: C. While some presidential executive initiatives need to start early in order to insure that there’s enough time to enact regulations and outlast legal challenges, the traditional idea of a “first 100 days” blitz was to capitalize on the president’s popularity while it was at its apex in order to lean on Congress to vote for his agenda. Trump faced two obstacles to doing that: the near-impossibility of getting the bipartisan consensus these days to clear 60 votes in the Senate, and the tiny margin of Speaker Mike Johnson’s caucus in the House, which was exacerbated by the resignation of Gaetz and Trump’s appointment of Waltz. As a result, not only has Trump not pushed any major legislation through Congress yet (even on an issue such as immigration where Democrats have been on the defensive and Trump could use money for more immigration judges), but also he has scarcely even tried to lay out an agenda for new laws, a budget, or a tax bill, with the exception of a transgender sports bill and some proposed spending rescissions. He hasn’t even asked Congress to repeal every penny of unspent Biden era budget authority, let alone presented a plan to abolish the Department of Education. I’d give Trump a lower grade if he’d introduced anything really dreadful or spent political capital on a losing fight, but there’s not much to work with here.
Judicial nominations: Incomplete. Trump hasn’t had the opportunity of a Supreme Court vacancy and has been too occupied with executive branch business to get to work filling the lower courts yet.
Trade: F. Trump’s trade agenda isn’t yet an irreparable failure, but he’s managed to do a remarkable amount of damage to the financial markets, the real economy (in terms of triggering layoffs and freezing in place investment and commerce that needs to be planned in advance), American alliances, American credibility, and his own and his party’s popularity and trust with the public. No president in American history has made such a large self-inflicted mistake, at least on the economic front, in his first 100 days as Trump’s effort to start a global war on trade without clear aims, allies, or a comprehensible exit strategy. He has exceeded the powers he should be able to exercise without Congress, and his multiple reversals of course, pauses, piecemeal exemptions, and individual country tariffs based on a crackpot formula have all illustrated why the tariff power should reside in a legislature that makes prospective rules after extensive input, rather than being changeable by the whim of one man. It’s now hard to see why China or other major trade counterparties would have any incentive to make serious concessions rather than just wait out Trump’s inability to stay the course under pressure. To top it all off, the trade issue has stomped all over any message the administration has tried to get out on tackling inflation.
Economic Policy: B+. The rest of Trump’s economic agenda has been more pro–free market, with big positive steps in expanding energy production and reducing regulations. The bad news is Trump musing aloud about tax hikes (since walked back) and generally not having a plan for fiscal policy.
Immigration: B+. On the upside, as was predictable, Trump has swiftly taken control of the border and restored the common-sense border policies of his first term. Designating the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations is also a step of greatly underrated importance. On the downside, the rushed and sloppy effort to maximize deportations while minimizing due process has already led to embarrassments and totally unnecessary clashes with the courts, and could easily lead to worse.
Constitutionalism: C−. More broadly, Trump’s first term was much more constitutionally modest than his reputation; that has not been the case this time around. For every effort to right-size the constitutional relationship between the president and the rest of the branch he is supposed to run, Trump has done unconstitutional things (such as his birthright citizenship order) or strained the limits of what he can do and sown mistrust of the courts as well as his own trustworthiness with the public.
Higher education, the legal profession, and civil rights: C+. There’s a lot to like in Trump’s executive actions to end racial preferences and disparate-impact liability, and he’s taking on some sacred cows in the colleges and big law firms that have done their share of harm to equal rights, free speech, and the culture. But he has yet again gone too far with the universities, and gone a lot too far with the law firms.
China: C−. Even aside from how Trump’s trade policies have undermined our alliances with China’s neighbors while forcing Trump to negotiate with Xi Jinping, the administration has made too many conciliatory noises while refusing to enforce the clear congressional demand to get ByteDance to stop running TikTok unless it has an American buyer lined up imminently.
Russia and Ukraine: D. Trump is still feeling his way to a resolution that may or may not come in Russia’s war on Ukraine, so as with China, his grade could yet end up better than it looks now. But the administration’s rhetoric on the war has been shameful, as was the disastrous blowup with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.
Israel, Iran, and the Middle East: B. This grade could get a lot worse if early indications of interest in reviving something like the Obama era Iran deal goes further. That would be a huge step backward from the first term. The offensive against the Houthis has been a brighter spot, the Signal mess notwithstanding.
Life: B. Last among priorities but not least in importance, the administration has mostly been quiet on the abortion front, rolling back some Biden actions and avoiding doing harm, but also directing a lot more energy at other targets rather than, say, enforcing federal law against interstate mailing of the abortion pill. On the upside, here and in other areas, the solicitor general’s office switching from a foe to a friend of socially conservative causes is a plus.
Overall grade: C−. Trump has tried to do a lot of good and may end up with more credit if more of it sticks. But his tariff policies have overshadowed and complicated so many of his other efforts, and the combination of the team he has in place and the philosophical orientation we’ve seen so far bodes very poorly for the rest of Trump’s second term. He has already squandered opportunities he won’t have again, blown any chance to set a tone of restoring sanity after the wild policy excesses, social policy extremism, and drunken-sailor spending of the Biden years, and begun what looks like a process of restoring the fortunes of the Democrats without their having learned anything from their mistakes. Trump has, once again, proven more adept at breaking things than building them, and he is less restrained by law than he was previously — an ominous sign, given how much damage to constitutional governance was done the past four years. Given that there is nowhere else besides the Republican Party for constitutionalists, free marketers, social conservatives, or foreign policy hawks to go, it may be a long and dark road ahead.