The New Yorker – Donald Trump’s First 100 Days

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This Wednesday marks Donald Trump’s hundredth day back in the Oval Office. It’s been a tumultuous and shocking few months, characterized by the Administration’s flurry of executive orders, defiance of court orders, multiple about-faces on tariffs, and so much more. For today’s newsletter, we asked a few of our writers covering Trump 2.0 what has surprised them most. Plus:

• John Cassidy on the economic fiasco of Trump’s first hundred days
• David Remnick on the difference eight years makes
• America’s backslide into Hungarian-style autocracy
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House.

I think the most surprising thing about Trump’s first hundred days is that he has maintained the capacity to surprise, and not in a good way. I anticipated the chaotic decision-making, policy reversals, and infighting among his aides. But in the economic sphere, where Trump has launched an unprecedented trade war, the level of chaos has exceeded all expectations. He’s created so much uncertainty and fear that he’s spooked businesses and households alike. At this stage, it’s practically impossible to predict what will happen from here. —John Cassid

The surprise, to many, is that Trump acted—and so swiftly—on the numerous disruptive and even outright destructive things he’s spent years threatening to do, from taking revenge on his political enemies to imposing the highest-in-a-century tariffs. As always, Trump’s a mirror to the souls of others—the question, for the next hundred days and beyond, is what his actions will reveal about those who are profoundly threatened by them. —Susan B. Glasser

On immigration policy, nothing prepared me for the outright cynicism and legal brinksmanship of the Trump Administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to disappear Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The federal courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, have tried to block the Administration, and it has openly defied them. There are now more than two hundred Venezuelan men stranded in a notoriously brutal foreign prison who have yet to see any legal charges against them. —Jonathan Blitzer

I’ve been most surprised by the breadth and velocity of Trump’s actions—everything, everywhere, all at once. We were not prepared for DOGE, and its intense and sweeping effort to feed the government into the woodchipper. There were hints that the Administration would resist court orders, but I was not braced for brazen defiance. —Ruth Marcus

I would say what has surprised me most is Trump’s commitment to tariffs. The cruelty and incompetence were predictable. But the easiest thing to argue about Trump over the past decade—and generally the most accurate—is that he has governed largely without any conception of the national interest. His obsession with tariffs, however strange or misguided, makes me think that this thinking is slightly too simplistic. But only slightly. —Isaac Chotiner

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