'Disrupt, break, defund': Trump's imperial first 100 days

WASHINGTON — In every government building and federal courthouse, in the offices of boutique nonprofits and the world’s largest law firms, in high schools and cancer wards, there is a palpable sense that the country has changed — all within President Trump’s first 100 days back in office.

White House officials are hailing the milestone this week, proclaiming that, in his initial sprint, the president has already accomplished much of what he had promised. Border crossings are at their lowest levels in decades. Diversity initiatives are receding. Efforts to shrink the size of government are well underway.

Yet other campaign promises — to bolster the economy, rein in everyday costs, quickly secure peace in Ukraine, root out corruption and end the “weaponization of justice” — seem either elusive to Trump or further out of reach, owing to a series of policy decisions that have soured American public opinion on his presidency in record time.

Trump’s own tariff policies, intended in theory to rebalance global trade to the benefit of U.S. manufacturers and farmers, risk immediate pain to American households and a prolonged economic crisis. His efforts to ingratiate himself with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have brought the war no closer to an end. And Trump remains in feverish pursuit of his political enemies, from high-powered figures to campus dissidents, with the Justice Department at his disposal. Meanwhile, those on the president’s side have been spared cuts, audits and investigations.

The president’s stated effort to make the government more efficient is creating deep uncertainty in communities across the country, with state governments, research institutions and nonprofits unable to rely on federal aid and grants. School administrators cannot say who will process funding for rural and low-income communities if staff at the Education Department is cut in half. The federal office that serves the 57 U.S. communities hardest hit by HIV faces closure. Longer wait times for care are expected from a Department of Veterans Affairs that, despite receiving a record number of disability claims, is proposing to slash its workforce by 17%.

More than any particular policy, Trump’s second try at the presidency has proved a stark departure from the first because, this time around, he is testing whether any limits exist on executive authority. Trump and his team are pressing a theory of the “unitary executive,” that constitutional power is concentrated in a single man, allowing the White House to move more aggressively and with greater speed facing fewer guardrails.

The concept of marking a president’s first 100 days originated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used it as a goalpost to push through an extension of government employment to hundreds of thousands of Americans, and to work with Congress to pass over a dozen pieces of landmark legislation.

“The bookend to that seems to be Trump, whose focus has been on dismantling things,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”

“Trump is asserting a particular theory about executive power, but that’s really all he has,” Ekbladh said, “and that has defined his first hundred days — disrupt, break, defund.”

A rush to concentrate power

On March 17, Inter-Con, a Pasadena-based security firm, faced a stark choice that would later be documented in court filings: Allow staff from Elon Musk’s government efficiency program into the U.S. Institute of Peace, or face the elimination of its federal contracts. The firm relented. What had been an independent, congressionally funded agency was overrun.

Elon Musk holds a chainsaw as he arrives to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

It was a common scene unfolding across Washington throughout Trump’s first days back in power. Under Trump’s direction, Musk’s workers had already infiltrated much of the federal government in a lightning operation designed to overwhelm. The first marked for cuts were aid workers, educators, scientists, researchers, refugee officers and other civil servants who had served across Democratic and Republican administrations. The very notion of an independent government workforce had become the target.

Programs promoting democracy and human rights at the State Department were proposed for cuts. And amid a federal hiring freeze, tests for the Foreign Service — men and women who staff U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, often for their entire professional lives — were put on hold. A draft executive order circulated proposing an overhaul of the exam that had long focused on knowledge of international affairs to now require candidates demonstrate “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision.”

Trump has signed fewer laws in his first 100 days than any modern predecessor while setting a record for issuing executive orders over the same period, leaning on the powers of his office and circumventing congressional authority — undoing offices such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Voice of America that are congressionally mandated and appropriated, without any coordination with Capitol Hill.

In principle, many Republican lawmakers support the administration’s actions as a long-overdue effort to streamline government. But in private, GOP representatives and senators speak openly about Trump’s treatment of their caucus not as a check or equal partner, but as a vassal of his presidency.

“We are all afraid,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said this month, expressing concerns in Congress that the administration will retaliate against the noncompliant.

President Trump speaks with residents as he tours a fire-affected area in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 24.

(Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images)

The administration has used federal funding for once nonpartisan programs, such as school lunches and disaster relief, as a tool to threaten state officials who disagree with the president’s priorities. In one of his first acts, Trump threatened to withhold federal aid from California after Los Angeles was ravaged by fires in January unless the state complied with a series of unspecified demands. He warned that cities refusing to turn over details on undocumented migrants, referred to as “sanctuary cities,” would face funding cuts.

At a White House event in February, when Maine’s Democratic governor told the president she would follow state and federal law regarding the treatment of transgender athletes in schools, Trump replied, incorrectly, “We are the federal law.”

“You better do it,” he added, “because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” The Department of Agriculture then froze funding for child nutrition programs in the state, where a total of two transgender students are playing in school sports programs — a move that was halted by a court that found the administration’s process unlawful.

On several occasions in just over three months, Trump has said he isn’t joking about exploring ways to run for a third term, or to otherwise remain in power. Earlier this month, he expressed regret that President Biden was allowed to take office after winning the 2020 election because Biden “undid” so many of his previous accomplishments. “That’s why we have to stay president for a long time,” Trump told reporters.

Addressing the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump suggested the administration might move to wrest control over election procedures, despite the constitutional requirement delegating those powers to the states.

“We’re gonna get good elections pretty soon,” Trump said. “The states are just an agent of the federal government.”

Stress on checks and balances

From its outset, the Trump administration questioned the authority of district judges to issue rulings that would affect its policies nationwide — a common frustration of past presidents. But over the last 100 days, as lawsuits flooded in across the country challenging his policies, signs emerged that Trump and his allies were slow-walking, if not directly ignoring, court orders.

Eric Kalosa-Kenyon holds a sign demanding the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on April 22.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In February, a court temporarily halted the Office of Management and Budget from freezing federal aid to states, a policy that had prompted more than 20 states to sue. The White House did not fully comply with the order, a judge later found.

In a separate case, another judge ordered the Trump administration to stop and even turn around deportation flights of Venezuelan nationals to facilities overseas — only for a flight to proceed, prompting the judge to question whether Trump officials were in criminal contempt.

No single case has captured the president’s aggressive approach to immigration and to the courts more than that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador despite a court order in place barring his removal. The administration calls him a gang member; his family denies that. Even after the Supreme Court issued a ruling that directed the administration to “facilitate” his return, the White House has refused to do so, and insists he will never come back.

The Trump administration’s rush to remove as many undocumented immigrants from the country as quickly as possible has resulted in multiple wrongful detentions, including of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, a matter raising alarms over the administration’s interest in the rights of all people, regardless of their status, to due process of law.

Trump administration officials argue it was actually their predecessors — Biden and his team — who ignored the rule of law by tolerating an open southern border, allowing millions of unvetted foreign nationals to enter the country illegally, an issue that fueled Trump’s extraordinary political comeback.

But recent actions by the Trump administration, such as the FBI’s arrest of a Wisconsin county judge last week, challenge the foundational premise of checks and balances established in the country’s founding years, by the Supreme Court in Marbury vs. Madison, that it is the judiciary, not the executive, which reviews the law and determines who is outside it.

The prospect of Trump openly defying the courts appears to have sparked concern at the top of the judiciary. In a rare overnight order this month, faced with an emergency appeal over an imminent deportation flight, a Supreme Court majority circumvented one of its most conservative justices and gave the administration explicit instructions: “The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.”

“Trump is relying on the ‘unitary executive theory’ for many of his more shocking orders,” said Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University. “We will soon learn whether the Supreme Court agrees with that.

“If it does, at least in large part,” he added, “it would empower the president to make major decisions without consulting Congress that have rarely occurred before — even during wars.”

Crackdown on dissent

When stock and bond markets erupted with fear and uncertainty over Trump’s global tariff plan earlier this month, prompting the worst April on Wall Street since the Great Depression, Scott Bessent, the president’s Treasury secretary, became the policy’s chief public champion. Only in private did the longtime hedge fund manager work to persuade the president to place a partial pause on the rate hikes, a move that Trump ultimately chose when faced with the prospect of an imminent economic crisis.

Trump trained his ire instead on Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, who by law is meant to operate independently until his term ends in the spring of next year. Powell’s public assessment of Trump’s tariff plan — that it will raise prices and slow growth, achieving the opposite of his central campaign promise — has provoked Trump to risk further market turmoil by floating his extrajudicial firing.

The White House has taken a similarly aggressive approach to institutions across civil society, once thought of as independent, at the hint of dissent from government views.

Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally in Cambridge, Mass. The university sued the Trump administration over threatened funding cuts.

(Charles Krupa / Associated Press)

Trump took aim at law firms such as Paul Weiss over their previous representation of his political opponents, among other perceived slights, issuing executive orders that would have restricted their ability to work with government agencies and contractors. Rather than fight, some of the country’s largest firms, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, chose to cut deals with the administration to perform tens of millions of dollars in work for the White House.

The administration also targeted media organizations, taking control of access to the president from the White House Correspondents’ Assn., pressuring CBS News with a lawsuit and barring the Associated Press from White House events over its use of the term Gulf of Mexico — an international term for an international body of water — instead of the president’s preferred term, Gulf of America. The administration has partially lifted its ban on the news agency under court orders.

Just last week, Harvard, one of the country’s preeminent academic institutions, sued the Trump administration over its plans to withhold billions of dollars in federal aid to the university, after it refused to accede to intensive government oversight of its educational standards. Over 150 colleges across the country signed a letter in support of Harvard’s effort.

A turn toward expansionism

The president’s tariff policies, applied to “friend and foe alike,” were just the latest moves by Trump to upend Washington’s relationship with the world.

The International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid organization co-founded by Albert Einstein, has said that on- and off-again U.S. cuts to roughly 40% of its programs will hit millions around the world whose health, and goodwill toward America, have been sustained by such assistance.

The cuts by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to overseas programs occurred with such speed that, in February, Musk said that a U.S. program to prevent the spread of Ebola, one of the world’s deadliest diseases, in Uganda had been “accidentally” slashed, then restored. A new State Department plan nevertheless proposes deep cuts to the U.S. diplomatic presence in Africa.

Trump’s decision to blame Ukraine for Russia’s invasion of its sovereign land rattled European leaders, prompting them to begin unprecedented talks over a security structure for the continent that would leave out the United States — including discussions over the possibility of Europe maintaining an independent nuclear deterrence.

President Trump with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

(Mystyslav Chernov / Associated Press)

A disastrous meeting in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and a Signal chat among top administration officials over a sensitive military operation that mistakenly included a reporter, underscored an authentic loathing within the Trump administration toward Ukraine and Europe. Trump has yet to give remarks advocating against autocracy and authoritarianism in his second term.

Even the country’s closest democratic allies and largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, faced ridicule, seemingly arbitrary import tax rates, and threats of territorial ambition. Trump’s national security team is actively discussing whether to conduct limited strikes on Mexican drug cartels — potentially in violation of Mexican sovereignty — and the president has repeatedly referenced Canada as the 51st state, comments taken in jest in Washington that Canada’s former prime minister warned behind closed doors should be taken seriously.

Trump’s proposal for peace in Gaza — floated and then largely dropped in recent weeks — was a U.S. government takeover of the strip, which has proved a security and diplomatic nightmare for Israel to manage, within and from afar, for decades.

Far more sincere are the Trump administration’s designs on Greenland, which are advancing, two administration officials said. The president has repeatedly said he sees the Danish territory, as well as the Panama Canal, as vital to U.S. national security.

“I don’t know if there’s a strategy, but there is an outlook,” said Peter Kastor, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America.”

“He talks often about what he sees as the virtues of strength and power,” Kastor added, “so it makes perfect sense that he’d admire strong and powerful nations — and he’s kind of old school in this vision, that powerful nations demonstrate that power by acquiring land.”

In late March, Vice President JD Vance visited Greenland with his wife. They were not invited, and the people of Greenland made that clear, forcing the second couple to cancel their initial plans to visit cultural sites and a dogsled race. Instead, the Vances visited Pituffik Space Base, where American service members work together with Canadian, Danish and Greenlander allies.

Protesters at the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen after Vice President JD Vance accused Demark of under-investing in Greenland.

(Nils Meilvang / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP/Getty Images)

Vance’s remarks around the trip were unmistakable in their message: Trump is serious about exploring closer ties to the island. Already, the president had said he is willing to use military force, if necessary, to achieve his aims.

So Col. Susan Meyers, the commander at the Space Force base there, sent an email to U.S. and allied service members at the base: Vance’s remarks do not reflect the views of the U.S. military. “I commit that, for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together,” she said.

Meyers was swiftly removed, the Pentagon said, “for loss of confidence in her ability to lead.”