Not long before taking office, Donald Trump assured his supporters that he would have "the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history." And, of course, his second government is not ordinary.
Historians tend to evaluate presidents through the breadth of their achievements, from ineffective to transformative scale. The classic measuring rod for 100-day achievement is Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. The first paragraph of the fanatical new policy lists a series of major legislation that sets up new financial regulations and ambitious public works projects that helped the economy begin to recover from the Great Depression.
According to Roosevelt's record, the first 100 days of the second Trump term can be regarded as a painful failure. The president failed to pass major legislation, and his economic interventions were contrary to Roosevelt's effect, injecting uncertainty into healthy recovery and economic crises.
However, his presidency is still the result. In just a few months, Trump destroyed democratic norms, weakened federal bureaucracy and reorganized the United States with traditional friends. Because Trump’s goals are so abnormal in history, the traditional measure of presidential achievement is hardly useful. His Carter-style record as a legislator and economic steward is in stark contrast to his Leninic record in opposition. For the president's legacy of dominance, the effect is victory. For almost everyone else, it heralded ruins.
In alternative reality, Trump’s 2024 victory paved the way for a traditionally successful presidency and achieved widespread popularity and specific policy achievements. After the election, his votes surged, and the numb Democrats retreated to self-doubt. Some of them concluded that their best way forward is to work with the new president. Congress formed a bipartisan church caucus that eagerly eliminates inefficient members of the government. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, perhaps the Democratic Party’s most positioned presidential contender at the time, sent a letter to Trump to provide cooperation.
In the real world, despite obvious opportunities, Trump has never tested the possibility of constructive participation. The president clarified his thinking process in his speech to Congress earlier last month. "I looked at the Democrats in front of me and I realized that I absolutely had nothing to make them happy," he complained. "I could find a way to cure the most devastating disease - an answer that could wipe out the entire country, or declare the greatest economy in history."
Here, he participates in the projection. Existing evidence shows that Trump will never Imagine Supporting a legislation proposed by political opponents is simply because it proposes some valuable policy objectives. (That's why an infrastructure bill and strengthening domestic manufacturing of silicon chips was listed as a priority Trump's highest statement until President Joe Biden passed the ideas through the law, when they became a disaster to be abolished.
Instead of working inside the system, he set out to smash the opposition. He appears to have placed all the leverage of state power in the hands of unprincipled loyalists and used the threat of investigation, prosecution and punitive debt to incorporate punitive funds from ransomware media owners, law firms and universities into compliance. He attempted to establish in his immigration enforcement powers the ability to vanish people who may commit crimes and may or may not live illegally in the country, thus abandoning the court order to cease.
Trump engraves double standards in law enforcement through generous allies and selective law enforcement. At least, he cleared the way for corruption in the system. To the greatest extent, he is working to ignore court orders against him and to establish a legal regime in which the law restricts only his enemies.
Trump's allies Don't recognize any legal location of the democratic opposition. They began to see all progressivism as a false consciousness that was implanted into academia, philanthropy, the media and a handful of puppet masters in Hollywood. Their operating theory is that by cutting funds, they can evacuate the liberal ideology itself. In this work, Trump and his inner circle consciously modeled themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, which seized the height of the command of government power to highly suppress opposition while allowing its president and his family to steal huge amounts of corrupt wealth. The Orbánization project has progressed like a clockwork.
But one detail seems to have obscured Trump and his allies’ concerns: Hungary is a relatively poor country beyond its tiny parasitic elite. This should be a sign that no matter the Orbán model that benefits the right-wing ruling class, it has little hope to help usher in the "golden age" Trump provides for the country.
Even if Trump learns this fact, it may not be bothered. Almost every decision he made has given priority to the power of traditional director skills. The trade-off between loyalty and ability is already obvious.
Trump’s first major family policy decision was to hand over almost critical power to Elon Musk, whose people had limited knowledge of the administration, which was exacerbated by the weakness of infinite self and conspiracy theory. Musk first promised to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion, which was his goal, which he revised to $1 trillion, and then, at the time of writing, revised it to $150 billion. Even that number is 93% smaller than the original target, and it is almost certain that Musk has actually achieved actual savings. In fact, by cutting the functionality of IRS tax collection, the Doge project is likely to end up causing the government far more than it saves.
Even so, Musk wreaked havoc on the federal bureaucracy through pure chaos. His raging morale and targeting probation employees (not only new employees but also the categories of many long-term civil servants who have recently been promoted), he is worse than a random approach to management.
With the administration's in-depth cuts on scientific and medical research, Trump decided to control public health to the well-intentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Here, the similarities between Hungary are also eye-catching. Alban's economy suffered a brain loss because the regime's cronyism drove its great ideas to work in a free society. Trump’s policy has shown early signs of producing similar results, as it may be that international students must consider whether they deserve to be detained by ICE or suddenly revoke their visas due to smaller legal violations.
In a way, the result is a product of design rather than an incompetent: Trump sees scientists and other experts as enemy classes, and he tries to suppress in pursuit of his political goals, even if doing so will make the country poor.
Trump's incompetence is the most obvious in prosecuting him for the trade war against the planet. His allies see it as a negotiation strategy, but strategies like this require him to use the "madman theory" to gain leverage by scaring the rest of the world that he has frantically promoted a global recession while reassuring American businesses at the same time. He has thus taken over Bluster and retreat, causing the U.S. economy to absorb almost all the expenses of a total trade war without the chance to capture the theoretical benefits Trump hopes to achieve.
Trump makes the United States essentially a self-management sanctions system. Grace in the rest of the world could be extended to help him escape the mission of inciting a crisis, which would be severely reduced by his threat to his peaceful neighbors. Anti-Trumpism has weakened the Conservatives in Canada and Australia, providing flavor to the hostile world stage Trump has built for himself.
Meanwhile, the trade war has led to rising domestic inflation expectations, forcing the Federal Reserve to suspend its plans to lower interest rates. Trump’s initial instinct for the setback was to object to Fed Chairman Jay Powell, as if deleting those who tried to manage the dilemma caused by Trump would eliminate the dilemma itself.
This impulse highlights the extent to which Trump plays the biggest role in getting him elected: dissatisfied with the inflation caused by the pandemic. Instead of recognizing the instability of his victory, he saw it as a mission to launch an authoritarian cultural war.
The consequences of Trump’s mismanagement are almost entirely. The operation of the hammer blows toward the bureaucracy only begins to take effect, and there is no later saying that routine tasks or emergency responses will collapse. Unless Trump quickly reverses efforts (he may not want) and cleverly (requires a skill level he may not have), the economy will suffer from the consequences of a scattered slowdown to a full recession.
Contrary to clichés, authoritarian rulers don’t always run trains on time. They replace good governance and provide a combination of publicity, grafting and intimidation. The less they meet the public’s legal requirements for a prosperous and well-run public service, the harder they will be to oppress the opposition. As Trump's approval rating continues to drop, he continues to discover new forms of revenge.
Trump's first 100 angels have put the country on an unsustainable route. The conflict between the president's determination to rule and his inability to rule has created two opposing forces: a weapon, a liberal state and a slump in political opposition. One of them will have to break.