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In his inaugural speech on 20 January, Donald J Trump promised “the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history”. Well, that’s one promise that the president has definitely honoured – but not, as the saying goes, in a good way.
No previous president has inflicted so much damage, on so many, in so short a time. The scale of the vandalism wreaked on America, on its friends and allies abroad, and indeed on the prosperity of the world, has been historic and prodigious.
Trillions wiped off stock markets. Trade with the second-largest economy on Earth, China, virtually frozen. The dollar and the standing of US Treasury bonds placed in jeopardy. A worldwide collapse in investor and consumer confidence. A recession likely in America in the months ahead.
Not exactly living up to the promise of “Make America Great Again”, let alone the wildly illogical and overblown claims made for the tariff policy on 2 April, President Trump’s “Liberation Day”. Had the president not rowed back, in chaotic fashion, from his bizarre policy, we might now be facing the worst global downturn since the 1930s – one not triggered by some energy crisis or spasms in the financial markets, but by a fully conscious president ignoring the warnings of all around him. The “Trump Slump” has, thus far, been narrowly averted.
The economic failures far exceed those made in the first Trump term, and they stem from something absent in the 2017-21 administration. Back then, Mr Trump neither expected to win nor was prepared for government. This time he is.
Unfortunately, the Project 2025 blueprint and the careful selection of members of his administration have produced an even less competent, experienced and independent-minded coterie than the one that surrounded him before. This is an administration unprecedented in its toadyism, with all of those in the highest ranks of government, with the partial exception of secretary of state Marco Rubio, displaying cult-like loyalty to their boss.
Not that the 47th president has needed any encouragement to rule by decree like a monarch. He has learnt how to use – and abuse – executive orders, and the result has been a systematic assault on the constitution that exceeds anything seen in Watergate or any other corrupt episode in US history.
Supreme Court judgments are ignored. Congress – the Republican contingent hopelessly compromised by the Maga cult – has been sidelined, with the Democrats responding to each new Trumpian outrage behaving like stunned goldfish.
Inspectors general have been fired; Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, granted the power of the purse; American citizens seized and deported without trial; the media menaced by lawsuits and loss of access; the right to vote curtailed; a judge arrested; others intimidated for doing their jobs; universities blackmailed; members of Congress accused of treason; citizenship by birthright – unequivocally protected by the 14th amendment of the constitution – cancelled by the stroke of a presidential Sharpie.
And, again, the world faces the prospect of another Trump run at the presidency in 2028 and a third term, contrary to the 22nd amendment. It is painful to watch American democracy being dismembered alive in this way – and it is happening before our very eyes.
Mr Trump’s record abroad also speaks for itself; again, the shift has been so swift and dramatic that it is difficult to process. At its most basic, America has changed sides and now seeks a partnership with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That is why Ukraine, a great inconvenience to the project, is being betrayed and abandoned, and why Volodymyr Zelensky, the Winston Churchill of our times, was ritually humiliated in the most shameful episode ever to take place in the Oval Office.
Along with the president’s narrowly “transactional” approach to American power, the alliance with President Putin is why European allies are vilified and told – by the vice-president, no less – that the greatest enemy isn’t Vladimir Putin but “from within”. JD Vance joked, last year, that Britain would soon be “the world’s first truly Islamist nuclear power”. Canada doesn’t deserve to be a sovereign state; Panama, Denmark and Greenland are being threatened with military force; Gaza is to become a sort of US-administered beach resort.
The list of Trumpian absurdities will lengthen and become more frightening as his presidency grinds on. He promised peace in Palestine and in Ukraine on “Day One”. Yet, on Day 100, a just peace with honour in either conflict seems almost as far away as ever.
So, it must be added, does any American contribution to stopping climate change. In fact, the decision to withdraw – again – from the Paris climate accords may well turn out to be the most fatal of President Trump's many grievous errors of judgement.
It is not usually a mistake to be pessimistic about Donald Trump. We know what he is capable of, and fear what he might still be capable of doing. Yet there is hope.
He has not been able to terrorise the financial markets – indeed, quite the opposite. This has restrained the very worst of his primitive instincts in trade and economic policy. He has not been able to bully all of his domestic critics, and the press remains, mostly, free of oligarchic control (unlike social media) or at risk of being replaced by ubiquitous and fascistic Trumpian online sycophants.
Leaders abroad have emerged with independence of mind, clarity of vision and the courage to stand up to him. In the West, the new Canadian premier, Mark Carney, is the outstanding example of what can be achieved through a show of defiant strength.
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s incoming chancellor, has been the most clear-sighted. He has warned that Europeans should harbour “absolutely no illusions” about President Trump, who “pretty much no longer cares about the fate of Europe” – and so much so that it is “unclear whether we will still speak of Nato in [its] present shape”. That is no less than the truth.
Almost everything Mr Trump has done in his first period in power has shocked, but much less of it comes as a surprise. He experimented, for example, with tariffs in his first term, as well as the unwise “bromance” with President Putin; and his entire business career has been a series of bluffs, bankruptcies and run-ins with the law.
The attempted Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 shows there are no limits to what he will do instinctively to cling to power and avoid defeat. He will continue to do so, up to and including an attempt to run and win again in 2028. What will be left after 1,000 days of the second Trump term?
There is, however, just the sense now that the resistance to him at home and abroad is growing, and so it must. American democracy and the safety and prosperity of the world cannot survive much more of this.
English (US) ·