Most newly inaugurated presidents are judged by their ability to start accomplishing the main goals upon which they campaigned for office within their first 100 days in the White House. That standard was set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) at the start of his first term in office in 1932, in the face of the multiple challenges of the Great Depression.
In the previous November’s election, the nation had turned to him for help during a profound economic and social emergency. Roosevelt responded immediately upon taking office by instituting several unprecedented federal emergency relief initiatives, spending a stunning $500 million on soup kitchens, blankets, employment schemes, and nursery schools for the poor, which would soon evolve into the federal Social Security system and the Work Progress Administration (WPA).
During his first 105 days in office, FDR convened a special session of Congress to pass 15 major pieces of legislation, which created the safety net of social and economic programs that we refer to today as the “New Deal.”
Roosevelt began by shutting down and totally revamping the failed American banking system, including the introduction of federal deposit insurance to protect the life savings of millions of American citizens. Other emergency measures for which FDR obtained congressional approval during his first 100 days as president included bills that created the federal Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority, and measures in the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Farm Credit Act that addressed the collapse of America’s farming economy.
Congress also passed the Securities Act, which led to the formation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock markets, which collapsed due to excess speculation in 1929, as well as the Homeowners Refinancing Act, which prevented 20% of the homes in urban America from going into foreclosure. During that period, Congress also enacted into law the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act, followed by the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created a nationwide public works program and the controversial National Recovery Administration (NRA), to stimulate and monitor businesses large and small across the economy.
On the night before he reopened the nation’s banks, FDR delivered an address to the nation over the still relatively new medium of radio, in what became the first of 30 “Fireside Chats” to reassure the jittery American public. In his next radio Fireside Chat, delivered on July 25, 1933, Roosevelt coined the term “first 100 days” in describing his purpose behind starting “the wheels of the New Deal” into motion, while at the same time setting a new standard against which all future newly installed presidents would be judged.
FDR’S “NEW DEAL” TRANSFORMED THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
FDR’s first 100-day initiatives marked the start of a major expansion in the power and authority of the federal government, as we know it today, over many areas of American life. It was also the model that Donald Trump used for making the radical changes he wanted to introduce at the start of his second term as president, when his popularity would be at its peak.
While FDR set a new record by signing 99 executive orders during his first 100 days as president, Trump exceeded that mark by signing 111 executive orders in the first 75 days of his second term as president.
As Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel points out, “The opening two months of this administration were… the policy equivalent of shock and awe. Day after relentless day, his team flooded the zone with new policy directives and reforms — cutting waste, killing regulations, imposing accountability.”
But it was too good to last. Once the bulk of Trump’s new policy initiatives had been announced and were being put into place, and his unconventional and relatively inexperienced picks for cabinet and agency heads had taken office, the inevitable transition problems, personality conflicts and plain old rookie mistakes inside his administration began to outweigh the novelty of his policy initiatives.
TARIFF UNCERTAINTIES AND WHOLESALE FIRINGS
The uncertainties and confusion concerning Trump’s rapidly shifting tariff proposals spooked the financial markets by raising fears of a recession and the return of inflation. They also angered long-term American allies and trading partners, such as Canada and Mexico.
Wholesale staff firings of longtime employees deliberately disabled several federal agencies that Trump had targeted for elimination because of their liberal agendas. These include USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and most of the federal Department of Education. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, at least 70,000 employees were fired or laid off, reducing department staff by nearly 15%.
Another agency that had been targeted by Trump and the Republicans for sharp staff reductions was the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It lost about 12,000 workers to early retirement and layoffs between Trump taking office in January and April 15, but it was still able to get through this year’s tax season with no major glitches.
The RFK Jr.-led Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has lost about 25% of its Biden-era 80,000-person workforce.
The large-scale firings, layoffs, and forced retirements sparked an outcry and court challenges from the liberals who supported the missions of the agencies hardest hit, and the government employee unions whose members were being fired.
CNN recently estimated that at least 121,000 federal workers were fired or laid off during the first three months of Trump’s second term.
That number does not include the newly announced plans by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to cut 132 offices from his agency to re-balance its allocation of human resources between the staffing of U.S. agencies and consulates in countries around the world and employees who focus on single foreign policy issues, such as human rights, arms controls and reducing human trafficking. Rubio is also streamlining the State Department’s organizational chart by combining offices with similar functions to make the agency as a whole more efficient and enable it to make policy decisions faster, in addition to saving money.
AN RFK JR.-LED REVOLUTION AT HHS
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) is also presiding over an internal revolution at the federal Health and Human Services (HHS) agency. A long-time critic of the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies and other large corporate interests over government health policies, as HHS director, RFK Jr. is now the point man for a new Trump-supported grass roots movement called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) which will put a new emphasis on efforts to identify and eliminate the causes of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. At least one of these chronic diseases now impacts 60% of all American adults.
Under RFK Jr.’s leadership, HHS and MAHA will lead the fight against the epidemic of obesity in this country, which now affects 42.4% of the adult population. They will also address the mental health concerns affecting about 20% of the population, and work to increase the basic metabolic health of the American people.
Along those lines, RFK Jr. announced last week that he had reached an agreement with all of the major American food producers to phase out potentially dangerous artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply by the end of next year, through the reformulation of such popular products as breakfast cereals, candy and snacks using only natural food coloring additives.
AUTISM HAS BECOME AN EPIDEMIC
RFK Jr. also said at a news conference on April that his agency will now concentrate on finding the reason for what he called an “epidemic” of autism in this country, with the latest survey saying that the frequency of a diagnosis of autism among 8-year-old American children has now risen to 1 out of every 31, or almost 3%, while 60 years ago it was under 0.05%.
The situation is even worse in California, where the number of autism cases annually rose from about 4,000 in 1989 to 206,000 in 2024, a shocking 51-fold increase over 35 years.
Similarly, major changes are also expected at the research-oriented National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the direction of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the direction of Dr. Martin Makary. Trump appointed these men, respected experts in their fields, after they had separately risked their professional careers by openly challenging the consensus of the medical establishment for its over-emphasis on Covid vaccines and for ignoring the role of herd immunity in fighting the pandemic. Both of them were eventually proven to be right.
TRUMP’S BACKLOG OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Trump’s enemies in the media played up the coverage of his administration’s mistakes and internal conflicts, even though almost all of them were minor or were quickly corrected. Gradually, the main subject of the daily news cycles shifted from amazement at the fast start of Trump’s presidency to the problems and uncertainties that it created, and the legal battles that his Justice Department has been fighting against the blizzard of orders issued by liberal federal judges to block many of his policy initiatives. Eventually, when the administration’s appeals to these judgments reach the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, most of Trump’s actions will probably be allowed to stand, but in the meantime, the implementation of many of his policies is being seriously delayed.
Trump also proved to be unable to fulfill his ambitious campaign promises to negotiate a quick end to the bloody war in Ukraine, force Hamas to release its remaining hostages, or scare Iran into abandoning its nuclear weapons program with the threat of a pre-emptive U.S.-Israeli attack.
As a result, after his first 100 days in office, Trump has a lot of unfinished diplomatic business to take care of, in addition to negotiating potentially complex tariff deals with dozens of American trading partners over the next 90 days.
Since the GOP’s legislative victory in passing a “clean” continuing resolution to keep the government running through the end of this fiscal year, there has been little progress towards the passage of the “big beautiful bill” Trump has asked for, containing his proposed tax cuts.
Trump has continued to sign executive orders and put other important new federal policies in place, such as measures to stimulate more domestic fossil fuel energy production.
DOING AWAY WITH THE WOKE “DISPARATE IMPACT” STANDARD
Trump has also recently signed a far-reaching executive order called “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” It eliminates the “disparate impact” standard, which has been widely used to support “woke” liberal federal government initiatives intended to eliminate the “systemic racism” allegedly found in many local police and fire departments across the country. According to social critic Heather Mac Donald, writing in the City Journal, doing away with the disparate-impact theory “restores the 1964 Civil Rights Act to its original meaning,”
Mac Donald defines “disparate impact” as the claim that if a “colorblind” standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately large negative effect on a disadvantaged minority, such as blacks or Hispanics, it is discriminatory and violates civil rights laws. It has been widely used to do away with literacy and performance standards for police officers and firemen, basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the grading of medical licensing exams, setting minimum credit-standards for mortgage lending, the right of schools and teachers to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It is also the stock excuse for liberal district attorneys for refusing to prosecute those arrested for a large variety of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest. It has also been used to make it illegal for police to use stop, question, and frisk tactics against those acting suspiciously, and even to use speeding cameras to issue tickets to unsafe drivers.
The most diabolical aspect of the disparate impact standard is that for any practice to be banned by it, there is no need to prove that any form of discrimination against a specific group was ever intended. Just the fact alone that more members of a certain group are adversely impacted is itself taken as sufficient evidence that the practice of it by a targeted employer or institution is illegally discriminatory.
PERPETUATING THE MYTH OF “SYSTEMIC RACISM” IN AMERICA
According to Mac Donald, as a result of its widespread adoption, the disparate impact theory has perpetuated the active enforcement of civil rights laws and penalties long after the overt discriminatory actions against which the landmark 1964 Civil Rights law was originally passed by Congress had all but disappeared from mainstream American society. Nevertheless, if blacks, Hispanics, or members of another “disadvantaged” minority group failed to qualify at a disproportionate rate, the test or standard of behavior was automatically deemed by the disparate impact theory to be discriminatory and therefore illegal, as another proven example “white supremacy” in action.
That twisted logic is why liberals insist that the large proportion of young black males in America’s prisons should be treated as “innocent victims” of systemic racism in the criminal justice system and allowed to roam free, or, to take another example, that it is unfair to expect minority medical or law students to pass the professional licensing exams as “white” students do.
Meanwhile, Mac Donald notes that “the real cause of disparate impact, the yawning academic skills and crime gaps” exhibited more often by members of those minorities is consistently ignored by liberals. The irony is that by refusing to accept the reality and consequences of those academic skills and crime gaps, the liberals are preventing them from being effectively addressed and remedied.
By signing the executive order on April 23, which “eliminates the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible,” President Trump has effectively forced the review of every federal consent decree on local police and fire departments that relies on disparate impact analysis. Trump has thereby, in most cases, freed those departments of needless and costly federal supervision and permitted them, once again, to set their own admission and conduct standards.
RESTORING THE CONSTITUTIONAL STANDARD OF EQUALITY
Left-wing immigration rights groups are up in arms over Trump’s executive order because it restores the original requirement to prove discriminatory intent in order to seek redress from the federal government for alleged violations of any minority group’s civil rights, and end the practice of “reverse discrimination,” which the wrongful application of the disparate impact standard has led to in so many towns and cities across the country.
Mac Donald claims that the leftists are correct when they accuse Trump’s executive order of embracing a “formalist, colorblind conception of equality,” but she also points out that so does the U.S. Constitution.
Another Trump executive order directs all agencies and departments of the federal government and the U.S. military to dismantle their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, designed to counter the remnants of organized racism and discrimination in American society today. The Trump administration also targeted the DEI programs at private law firms, public universities, and other institutions that receive federal funding or rely on federal approvals.
The Trump administration is also encouraging all companies doing business with the federal government to dismantle their DEI programs as well. That is something that many large American companies were already doing at the behest of their stockholders after discovering that their existing DEI initiatives were doing little or nothing to contribute to their company’s profitability.
Another important new policy recently announced by Trump’s Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, will begin holding student borrowers accountable, once again, for the repayment of their college loans, putting an end to the blatant attempts by President Biden to “buy” their votes by offering to forgive their loans without the constitutionally required congressional authorization.
The anti-Trump mainstream news media have chosen to ignore those accomplishments and focus instead on the more controversial Trump initiatives. These include, most recently, his funding cuts mostly to Ivy League colleges, which refused to provide protection to their Jewish students against openly antisemitic protests conducted by supporters of the Hamas terrorists who carried out the heinous atrocities of the October 7 attack against Israel.
In their desperation to find even the feeblest excuse to justify their blind hatred of President Trump, liberal Democrats have come to the defense of illegal Muslim immigrants who have been deported by ICE because of their known ties to criminal foreign gangs such as MS-13 and Tren de Aragua.
Another recent example of the tolerance by senior Democrat elected officials for criminal gang member immigrants involved Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was born in El Salvador and entered the U.S. illegally in 2011 at the age of 16. He was seized, admittedly in error, by federal officers on March 15, 2025, near his home in Maryland and deported to a high-security jail in El Salvador. The liberal American news outlet, NPR, claimed that Garcia had been leaving “peaceably” with his wife and family, but federal officials presented evidence in a federal court indicating that Garcia’s wife had filed a complaint against him alleging domestic violence, as well as his ongoing association with, and connection to the various criminal activities of MS-13.
DEMOCRATS TURNING GANGSTERS INTO HEROES
Meanwhile, Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador where he arranged with local officials to meet with Garcia in his hotel room on April 17, and to lobby El Salvador and U.S. officials for Garcia’s return to Maryland. Meanwhile, President Trump accused Senator Van Hollen of grandstanding and said the senator had “looked like a fool” for seeking the return of such a dangerous individual.
Perhaps the most outrageous example of Democrat “doublethink” when it comes to the enforcement of existing federal immigration laws was the arrest last week of a Milwaukee County Circuit Judge, Hannah Dugan. She was charged with trying to help Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a previously deported illegal Mexican immigrant, avoid arrest by ICE agents at the courthouse after he appeared in her courtroom to be tried on a domestic violence complaint for which he had been arrested by local police.
However, despite the claim that Garcia and many other illegal immigrant gang members have been seized by ICE and deported illegally, the latest polls still show that an overwhelming majority of American citizens still support the Trump administration’s efforts to round up and deport all illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds who are living in this country thanks to Joe Biden’s open border policies.
TRUMP’S POPULARITY LIKELY TO RECOVER
As Strassel also notes, “Trump has a feel for politics” and has begun to move swiftly in recent weeks to re-establish the lost momentum of the first two months of his presidency. He is doing this by re-emphasizing the winning issues of his presidential campaign, such as cutting taxes and deporting dangerous criminal illegal aliens, by tamping down damaging market speculation over the impact of his tariffs, and by withdrawing his implied threat to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
It is also important to note that, very much like Trump today, 92 years earlier, FDR also suffered with pesky legal challenges from his political opponents which prompted the federal Supreme Court of that era to strike down some of his most sweeping New Deal initiatives, such as the NRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as unconstitutional. After winning election to a second term as president in 1936 by a historic landslide, FDR went so far as to try to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding enough liberal justices to its bench to overturn the previous decisions against his New Deal initiatives. That attempt ultimately failed because it was widely seen at the time and since as a prime example of presidential overreach.
Judged by the standards set by FDR, the mixed record of the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term as president will probably be evaluated more kindly by future historians than most of today’s liberal mainstream news media commentators, whose judgment and perspective are still clouded by Trump Derangement Syndrome.
THE POWER OF TRUMP’S “RIGHTEOUS RAGE”
Their problem was best described by a self-identified Trump critic, New York Times columnist David Brooks. Despite his strong anti-Trump bias, Brooks could not help but express his admiration for Trump’s “energy” in attacking the root causes of America’s problems as he sees them, even though Brooks still profoundly disagrees with many of Trump’s proposed solutions. Brooks writes, “You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.”
Brooks also correctly observes that, “The Trump administration is driven by… the desire for power, the desire for retribution… [and by] its own form of righteous rage. Its members tend to have a clear consuming hatred for the nation’s establishment and a powerful conviction that for the nation to survive, it [the unelected administrative establishment, also known as ‘the deep state’] must be brought down.”
Brooks compares Trump’s “superior boldness, decisiveness and clarity of purpose” to that of the leaders of other successful populist revolutionary movements, including “the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, Mao’s Communist Party in China, [and] Castro’s 26th of July Movement in Cuba.”
But while Trump may be as driven to achieve his goals in reforming the government as were French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre in 1789, Vladimir Lenin in 1917, Mao Zedong in 1949, and Fidel Castro in 1959, contrary to the claims of his critics, Trump has not shown their level of cruelty and authoritarian tendencies to defy the rule of law.
Trump continues to test the limits of his constitutional authority in the courts, but he has never willfully exceeded those limits, unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, who refused to enforce federal immigration laws and attempted to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of federal student loans without congressional authorization.
Trump has also already demonstrated that as president, he and his predecessor, Joe Biden, already had all the authority they needed to close down, virtually overnight, the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border with Mexico, without the passage of new congressional legislation. The only difference was that Trump had the will to end the foreign invasion while Biden’s widely promoted open border policies actively invited it.
The Mexican border crossing statistics speak for themselves. During December 2024, the last full month of the Biden administration, the number of aliens allowed to stay in the country after crossing the Mexican border was 96,037. That’s 3,201 a day. By contrast, in February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s second term, the number plummeted to 8,326 border apprehensions, or about 300 a day. And unlike during Biden’s presidency, almost all of those 300 were ultimately deported.
TRUMP DID MORE FOR THE U.S. IN 100 DAYS THAN BIDEN DID IN 4 YEARS
USA Today columnist Nicole Russell states that, “President Donald Trump has done more good for the United States in his first 100 days in the White House than Joe Biden did in four years.” At the same time, Russell notes that “much of the mainstream news media portrays the Trump presidency as a chaotic disaster. Trump has been smeared, scorned, and labeled an authoritarian… [suggesting that] America is already in steep decline because of Trump’s first 100 days.”
While Russell concedes that the anti-Trump media has contributed to the sense of panic and hysteria, as demonstrated by the wild day-to-day swings in the stock market, she is confident that Trump’s new “measures will, in time, improve our lives and strengthen our nation.”
Of all that Trump has done during his first 100 days in office, Russell is most impressed by the accomplishments of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, by undertaking “the Herculean task of trying to bring fiscal responsibility to [the] federal government.”
Russell has nothing but disdain for Trump’s Democrat critics who “snipe at every [DOGE] cut to the bloated [federal] bureaucracy.” In her eyes, the “Democrats have become the party of the status quo.”
MUSK CHANGED THE PUBLIC MINDSET ABOUT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
While she admits that “Musk overpromised with his goal to slash federal spending by $2 trillion,” Russell also believes “that Musk and Trump have done [something remarkable] in only three months: [Changing] the mindset in Washington [which] for years has been that deficits and the debt don’t really matter, that the bureaucracy will grow without fail…
“That mindset has now been shocked back to reality,” Russell writes. “Federal workers and entire bureaucracies have to justify their work — just like most ordinary American workers. And the expectation of endless government growth is gone.”
She also notes that while “Trump’s tariffs have ignited a firestorm of criticism and sparked predictions of a recession, there have been indications that the tariffs are bringing jobs back to America.”
Russell cites as examples several recent announcements:
Swiss drugmaker Novartis (which sells Ozempic) will make a $23 billion investment over five years to expand manufacturing and research in the United States.
Honda will move production of its Civic hybrid hatchback from Japan to America.
Drugmaker Eli Lilly will build four pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in the United States.
Russell also notes that, “while Trump’s approval rating has dropped since he took office,” she also believes that most of the 77.3 million Americans who voted Trump for in November are pleased that he has been moving “at an extraordinary pace” to implement the policies that he had promised them during the campaign.
As in FDR’s day, with both the White House and Congress in the hands of the president, the main hope of his political enemies to block Trump’s initiatives lies in the lower levels of the federal court system controlled by like-minded liberal judges unafraid to exceed their authority by seeking to “legislate from the bench.” The difference between the situation today and during FDR’s first 100 days is that the current Supreme Court is at least nominally under the control of a six-member majority block of conservative justices seen likely to uphold the legality of most if not all of Trump’s initiatives in the end, when the cases ultimately reach them on appeal.
LISTING TRUMP’S TOP 100 ACCOMPLISHMENTS
As a result, the list of 100 Trump first 100 days initiatives, both successful and not, compiled by USA Today columnist Susan Page, contains dozens of efforts currently blocked by temporary injunctions issued by liberal lower-level federal court judges who are testing the limits of their judicial authority, as Trump’s political opponents cheer them on.
Page counts among the first 100-day “events” the separate tariffs that Trump has announced on all imports from China, ranging up to 145%, to which China has already announced a retaliatory tariff of up to 125% on goods it imports from the U.S., which will either start a mutually painful trade war between the world’s two largest economies, or lead to a new deal negotiated by Trump to address the major outstanding trade issues between the U.S. and China.
Page also mentions Trump’s more whimsical and unlikely proposals, such as renaming the body of water, long known as the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America in all federal government publications, and the U.S. purchase of the island of Greenland from Denmark for global strategic purposes. She also notes Trump’s request that the U.S. Supreme Court rule on his executive order doing away with the legal principle of granting automatic birthright citizenship for every child born on U.S. soil, which appears to be guaranteed by a literal reading of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Nevertheless, Page is also forced to admit that, “Trump’s unprecedented use of executive powers has already slashed the federal workforce, banned [DEI] diversity programs, dismantled USAID, divided opposition Democrats over how to respond, and prompted longstanding U.S. allies to calculate how to navigate a new global reality.”
ANOTHER REPORTER CHERRY-PICKING FACTS TO MAKE TRUMP LOOK BAD
Page’s anti-Trump bias is also revealed by her effort to blame Trump for the record-high prices for a dozen eggs, due to the chicken shortage caused by a lingering nationwide bird flu epidemic that he inherited from Biden. Page cites the record high $6.25 average national average retail price for a dozen eggs in March, while barely noting that wholesale prices have already dropped by more than half since then, to $2.89 per dozen, due to Trump administration Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ emergency efforts to import 1.6 million dozens of chicken eggs from foreign sources such as Brazil, Turkey and South Korea since taking office.
Page also cherry-picked her immigration statistics to make Trump look more ineffective. Page noted that the Biden administration deported more than 12,000 illegal immigrants in February 2024, while only 11,000 were deported in the first full month of Trump’s second term presidency in February of 2025. Page failed to cite the real reason for that drop, that the flow of immigrants trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico has fallen by 94% since Trump was elected president on a campaign promise to catch and deport them from the U.S. en masse, in sharp contrast to the Biden administration’s “catch and release” policy.
Page took every opportunity to highlight the downside of recent Trump and GOP victories, including the reduced margins of victory of two Republicans who won recent special elections in Florida to replace House members who gave up their seats to accept posts in Trump’s cabinet.
Page also writes that Trump’s politically prudent decision to withdraw his nomination of GOP New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as his U.N. Ambassador is a sign of his administration’s “nervousness” over the ability of House Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the members of his very thin Republican majority in line.
Page tries to ridicule Trump’s announcement of 10% tariffs on all U.S. imports from sources around the world by questioning whether the tariff applies to “the penguins and seals that are the sole inhabitants of the remote Heard and McDonald Islands in Antarctica.”
She also suggests that Trump should be held responsible for Elon Musk’s decision to donate $25 million to the failed campaign of a conservative GOP candidate for a swing seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which wound up alienating a significant number of Wisconsin voters.
OVERLOOKING DOGE’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Page also notes in more than one entry on her list of 100-day events the results of Musk’s leadership of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). She focuses almost entirely on the tens of thousands of federal workers who were fired or forced into early retirement, and ignores completely the incredible amount of fraud, waste, and incompetence that was uncovered across the federal government by Musk and his highly skilled team of DOGE business executives and computer specialists.
Page does credits Musk and his DOGE team for initiating a massive consolidation of all federal records on individual Americans in order to create a comprehensive computerized database to prevent fraudulent government payments, as well as updating the computer technology used in all federal government departments and agencies to facilitate the effective sharing of the information, and the addition of coded auditing information for the tracking and verification of all government payments made by the Treasury.
It is quite possible that the savings to the federal government from putting its financial record-keeping system in order and by correcting and centralizing its records to prevent fraudulent claims from being paid could wind up saving more taxpayer money in the long run than all of the staff cuts and program closures it has recommended.
Meanwhile, Musk announced last week that at the end of his 100-day stint as a voluntary, unpaid federal worker, he will be phasing out his involvement in leading the DOGE operations, and spending more time running his Tesla car company, whose profitability has suffered due to widespread Democrat protests against Musk’s high-level involvement with the Trump administration.
FEDERAL WORKERS TO BE JUDGED ON THEIR SUPPORT FOR TRUMP’S AGENDA
According to the Wall Street Journal, DOGE’s role in supervising the hiring and firing of personnel in the various federal agencies and departments is being transferred and centralized in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), under more direct White House control.
In addition, from now on, the performance of federal personnel and their suitability for continued employment will be evaluated by OPM according to the priority they give to the execution of the president’s agenda. That OPM policy is a deliberate attempt to rein in the politically motivated obstruction of the president’s policies by federal employees, from which Trump suffered during his first term as president.
Similarly, Page implies that the controversial vaccine views of Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are somehow responsible for the deaths of two unvaccinated children who died during a Texas measles outbreak.
Page acknowledges that Trump has gone out of his way to make himself far more accessible to the news media than his predecessor. Joe Biden was almost never permitted by his staff and wife to make unscripted remarks to the public or reporters, for fear that it would reveal the extent of his cognitive decline, which finally became obvious for all to see during his televised debate with Donald Trump last June.
On the other hand, Trump seems to welcome every opportunity to convey his thoughts and opinions, while his political enemies continue to damage their credibility with every mean-spirited accusation against Trump or a member of his administration that turns out to be false.
Page listed some of Trump’s environmental initiatives, such as loosening restrictions on the mining of coal to foster American energy independence, opening up federal forest land for commercial logging activity, as well as federal lands in Nevada and New Mexico for the mining of strategically valuable rare earth minerals. Trump also enabled commercial fishing in a previously restricted area of the Pacific Ocean, 750 miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.
Page also notes Trump’s executive orders addressing some of his pet peeves, including the cancellation of federal restrictions on the amount of water to flow through shower heads and the cancellation of an order by President Biden ordering the phasing out of plastic straws in favor of paper ones, which Trump finds to be annoying.
Page also records the ups and downs of various indicators of America’s economic health since Trump took office, including the price of gold and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in addition to various measures of Trump’s popularity with the voters. However, all of these will be subject to the final outcome of Trump’s tariff negotiations with America’s trading partners, the most important of which is communist China.
She also tracks the ups and downs of Trump’s various business interests, and the influence of his presence at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club in Palm Beach, Florida, when he is not in the White House.
DEPORTING CRIMINAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IS A TRUMP TEAM EFFORT
Page takes a neutral position on the record so far of Trump administration efforts to round up and deport the dangerous illegal immigrants who are members of foreign-based criminal gangs such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13 and send them to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador if their home countries don’t agree to take them back, as well as the legal controversy over the procedures the administration used to deport them.
Trump’s Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been working in close cooperation with Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and Trump’s highly motivated border czar, Tom Homan, to round up the most dangerous illegal aliens and deport them from this country as quickly as the federal courts allow.
“We are confident we will ultimately prevail against the onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists who care more about the rights of these terrorist aliens than those of the American people,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller reinforced those statements by calling the targeted immigrants “documented foreign terrorists who infiltrated the country at the direction of an adversarial regime.”
TRUMP’S WAR ON CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM
Page’s list also notes the activities of the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force against antisemitism. It persuaded Columbia University to sign a consent agreement to end antisemitic demonstrations on its campus and protect its Jewish students after being threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in various federal grants to the school. However, Harvard University decided not to sign such an agreement and fight the Trump administration in court after it threatened to cancel $2 billion in federal funding, and Trump asked the Internal Revenue Service to remove the school’s tax-exempt status.
The Trump administration has also approached several large liberal law firms that have worked against Trump’s policies in the past, asking them to donate free legal work for the administration. Most of the law firms agreed, with the notable exception of Perkins Coie, which represented the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and secretly paid, on its behalf, for the creation of the Steele dossier filled with false allegations that Trump and his presidential campaign were colluding with the Russians.
Page’s 100-day list also includes routine actions for any newly installed administrations, such as Trump’s decision to replace the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and choosing reporters from new media outlets to fill the limited number of places in the traveling White House press pool.
In addition to demonizing Elon Musk for his pivotal role in supporting and implementing Trump’s transformative agenda, Trump’s political enemies have concentrated on his unlikely choice for Defense Secretary, former U.S. combat soldier and veterans’ advocate Pete Hegseth.
RESTORING PRIORITIES AT THE PENTAGON
Because he had no previous Pentagon experience, when he was named as Trump’s Defense Secretary, Hegseth was viewed as a threat to the entrenched military-industrial complex. Hegseth has said that unlike those who were in charge of the Pentagon during the Biden years, he will not sacrifice the combat readiness and effectiveness of this country’s fighting forces on the altar of political correctness, or in the pursuit of the unrelated liberal goals of fighting climate change and the promotion of racial and gender diversity.
As a military traditionalist, Hegseth also restored the original name to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, after it was changed due to a federal law calling for the renaming of all U.S. military facilities commemorating soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, such as General Braxton Bragg. This time, the base was officially re-named in honor of a decorated American soldier who fought in World War II and whose last name also happened to be Bragg.
Hegseth, who has no previous executive experience, has had his problems adjusting to his role as the civilian head of the most power military organization in the world. He has been harshly criticized for two instances of unauthorized use of the unsecure Signal smartphone app for discussing national security measures. But Hegseth remains fiercely loyal to President Trump and his agenda, and the president has reciprocated that loyalty by rejecting growing calls for Hegseth’s removal.
Trump said, with regard to Hegseth, in a weekend interview with two reporters for The Atlantic magazine, “I think he’s going to get it together. I had a talk with him, a positive talk.”
TRUMP IS ENJOYING HIS SECOND PRESIDENCY MORE THAN HIS FIRST
In the same Atlantic interview, Trump contrasted his experiences during the first 100 days of his first presidency and the first 100 days of his second term in office.
“The first time, I had [just] two things to do — run the country and survive,” Trump said. But he also felt handicapped because “I had all these crooked guys,” he did not know who had been recommended to him by Washington insiders to fill out his administration.
But for his second term, Trump told The Atlantic, he learned from that mistake and chose for the top roles in his administration only those people he knew would be loyal to him. As a result, Trump said, “The second time [as president], I run the country and the world.”
Because he is so much more confident and comfortable with the people around, during the first 100 days of his second term, he has been testing the limits of his executive authority, reimagining the role of the U.S. in the world, dramatically slashing the size of the federal government and working to overhaul the U.S. and global economic system.
Trump also confirmed, as people both inside and outside the White House told The Atlantic reporters, the president is having “more fun than he’d had in his first term.” In his own words, Trump told them, “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” and then added, “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
