Opinion Drew Goins Trump’s first 100 days shot right past ‘constitutional dictatorship’
April 29, 2025 at 3:54 p.m. EDTYesterday at 3:54 p.m. EDT, 6 min
The first 100 days
President Donald Trump talks with journalists on Tuesday outside the White House. (John McDonnell/For The Washington Post)
Time flies when you’re having fun and also when you’re hurtling from cruising altitude without a parachute, and so, just like that, we are today at Day 100 of the second Trump administration. How are things going?
“B+” one reader offers! Our letters team pulled together the thoughts of five folks who voted for Donald Trump; some are wary of the presidency’s start, but others remark on the first sprint’s “clarity” or even spectacularity.
If only the polling agreed. As three of our conservative columnists discussed in the latest Prompt 2025 newsletter, the president’s approval figure is in a nosedive.
Jim Geraghty, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jason Willick blame the tariffs, and they blame Trump’s focus on secreting out of the country immigrants who are in no way a public danger. Basically, as Ramesh puts it, the way the administration “is acting on priorities that the public does not share — such as trolling Democrats, smiting Trump’s enemies, and indulging his momentary whims.”
It’s not as though the opposition is soaring in popularity, however; poll respondents still trust Trump over congressional Democrats to fix the country’s problems. Jim muses: “If Democrats can’t gain ground at a time like this, when can they?”
Another thing Trump has not accomplished in his first 100 days: turning the United States into an authoritarian regime. But he’s working on it, Eduardo Porter writes!
In his column, Eduardo holds the United States of the past 100 days up against the darker parts of Latin American history and sees some frightening similarities. There are those aforementioned forced disappearances of immigrants, common among Latin America’s 20th-century dictatorships. Then there’s the government secrecy surrounding those disappearances.
